Louisiana sinkhole video: Watch grove of trees disappear below ground
A group of trees got sucked into a Louisiana sinkhole earlier this week, and you can watch them disappear right before your eyes.
The opening frames of the three-minute video, above, seem to portray a peaceful bayou scene with nothing out of the ordinary, but the people who were actually on site knew something dramatic was about to happen.
“Move it, move it!” a voice tells the cameraman. And then, “It’s moving that much? Oh that’s gone, right there.”
PHOTO: When the ground drops: Sinkholes
About 22 seconds into the video you can see what he is talking about: a small grove of about 10 trees begins to sink into the rippling brown water.
Less than 30 seconds later, the trees are fully submerged, never to be seen again.
The tree-swallowing sinkhole was first discovered in August 2012 about 40 miles south of Baton Rouge in Assumption Parish. Over time, it has expanded to cover 24 acres of this swampy part of Louisiana, and has caused the evacuation of 350 residents of the area, according to an Associated Press report.
This sinkhole was likely caused by the collapse of a salt dome -- a large deposit of salt deep beneath the Earth’s surface, explained Randall Orndorff, a supervisory geologist at the United States Geological Service, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“We don’t see a lot of natural sink holes with these salt domes because they are very strong and tight,” Orndorff said.
But this sinkhole probably wasn’t caused by nature. The state of Louisiana is currently suing a Houston-based company for causing the sinkhole, the AP reports. Scientists believe the company drilled too close to the edge of the salt dome, causing it to collapse on the side, and bringing down some of the surrounding sediment with it.
PHOTO: When the ground drops: Sinkholes
“The way you get a sinkhole is you have a void underground,” Orndorff said, “but this cavern they were drilling was several thousand feet deep, and we are not used to seeing something this deep collapse all the way up to the surface.”
Most sinkholes collapse for as little as a few days, and up to a few months, but the Assumption Parish sinkhole has been collapsing for a year.
“It will eventually stabilize,” Orndorff said, “but it is covered in water, in a bayou, so it is really difficult to tell what its potential is.”
