"Bayou Corne, Lousiana, is a town on the edge, as it continues its strange and curious journey as home to one of the largest growing sinkholes in the country. When the sinkhole opened up in the early hours of August 3, 2012, it spanned 325 feet and was hundreds of feed deep. Video of it swallowing 100-foot trees went viral; across the country, geologists struggled to explain what exactly was its cause, its speed and its implication. Conspiracy theorists are citing a relationship between the pit and the Gulf of Mexico some 50 miles south; others are citing the New Madrid fault some 450 miles north. Now, more than a year after it first appeared, the Bayou Corne sinkhole is roughly 25 aces and still growing. Currently, it is roughly the size of 20 football fields, exhausting methane from deep inside its core. Residents are, to say the least, frightened. Dennis P. Landry, when speaking to the New York Times, captured the strange appearance with a single phrase that has since drawn attention: "I think I caught a glimpse of hell in it." The sinkhole provides a literal threat—the image of the gulf widening and swallowing everything in its path is a dynamic image that gets to the heart of the threat in a more acute sense—but the bigger questions that has the environmentally minded worried is what the implications are of the flammable methane gas the sinkhole is firing upwards out of the pit, the backyards and the nearby swamp. "
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 03:03:00 +0000
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