What happens if you fall into a sinkhole

As should be obvious, going deep into the earth is generally a bad idea. Even with a pressure suit, you don't get very far before being incinerated from the heat. Note that you don't have to be touching the tunnel walls to feel this heat. The air itself in the tunnel is at these temperatures. Let's assume you put on some kind of futuristic suit that protects you from all pressure effects, all heat effects, all toxic gas effects, and all radiation effects.

Then what happens when you jump in the hole? You accelerate as you fall, picking up speed because of earth's gravity. After about ten seconds, having traveled 0. The air resistance at this speed is high enough to prevent you from accelerating more. The farther you fall, the weaker the gravity becomes because more and more of the earth's mass is above you canceling the gravity from the other side of the earth.

Also, as you fall, the air pressure goes up so that the air exerts more force against your motion. With gravity getting weaker, and air resistance getting stronger, your speed steadily drops.

The strength of gravity at the center of earth is zero because there are equal amounts of matter in all directions, all exerting an equal gravitational pull. Also, the air in the hole is so dense at this point that it is like traveling through soup.

Water seeps in and slowly wears away the clay, creating a cavern. When that layer caves in, everything above it is swallowed into the Earth. So what can you do if you fall into a sinkhole? How much time would you have to react?

And why might trying to climb out be a bad idea? The best way to survive falling into a sinkhole is not to fall in one. Sinkholes tend to show plenty of warning signs before they start to become dangerous.

Watch out for cracks in building foundations, walls, or sidewalks. Take a look outside as well. When a sinkhole forms, water will start pooling on the ground. Trees and fence posts will start to tilt or fall over. The vegetation might wilt and die due to the sinkhole draining away water. Ask a geologist or soil engineer if your house is at risk.

If it is, a professional can inject grout into the hole to reinforce the foundation. By the time that cracks start rapidly appearing, you may only have seconds to get out before the ground collapses.

If you are caught in the sinkhole, brace for impact. The size of a sinkhole ranges from 1 m 3 ft to hundreds of meters in diameter and depth.

Cover your head, tuck your knees with your legs together, and fall on your side, rolling backward. This is called the parachute landing fall.

It evenly distributes the shock of impact across your body. What can you do from down here? If you can, try to move towards the middle of the hole. Anything above you could still fall. Stay low and small. Worse still, a new state law passed in to crack down on spurious sinkhole claims means that insurance companies are no longer obliged to perform extensive geological testing. Then there are the psychological costs of discovering you might have a sinkhole problem.

You know the house is not well supported and you start to wonder if it might fall in. A helicopter casts a shadow over the chasm in Guatemala Getty Images. Understandably, then, some Floridians have raised concerns about the sinkhole vulnerability map. A better solution might be to spot sinkholes as they develop — and Nasa may have found a way to do so from high above, with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar InSAR , which detects tiny movements in the ground.

When a large sinkhole formed unexpectedly at Bayou Corne in August , swallowing land and prompting hundreds of local residents to leave for good, they went back and analysed radar scans taken in the area before the collapse.

They noticed that the ground had moved significantly, shifting horizontally by 10 inches 25cm towards the centre of where the sinkhole opened, a month before it gave way. Watching out for the same telltale changes in other sinkhole-prone areas could form part of an early-warning system to help residents evacuate before a potentially dangerous collapse. But Jones gets the impression that authorities are beginning to take the sinkhole problem more seriously.

And so while there are good reasons why people who already own property in sinkhole-prone areas might be wary of new mapping and prediction plans that could threaten their investment, those thinking of building in these areas will probably be more enthusiastic. In Depth Natural disaster. Sinkholes: Can we forecast a catastrophic collapse?

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