Biggest ever sinkhole tears across New Zealand farm

The biggest ever sinkhole has just torn through a farm in New Zealand and it is so huge that it can consume a six-storey building easily.

Outside the city of Rotorua in New Zealand, a massive sinkhole has ripped open across a farm in an area known as ‘Earthquake Flat’. The emptiness of the huge sinkhole is calculated to be such that it can swallow a six-storey building without any difficulty.

The sinkhole is so big that it could fit two football fields inside it. Even the volcanologist Brad Scott confirmed the massiveness of the sinkhole, claiming that the other sinkholes he has witnessed have only been a third of the size of this one, as per Science Alert.

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The sinkhole was accidentally discovered by a worker on the New Zealand farm during early morning and dark. The farm manager Colin Tremain described the horrifying moment when he saw the enormous sinkhole at daytime. He also said that the area though was fenced out but, even if it hadn’t been, the farm cattle would have jumped over the fences and into the sinkhole, reported The Inquistr.

“It wasn’t until I came down in daylight that I actually saw just how big it was. We’ll keep it fenced off as it is to keep stock out, although stock aren’t stupid, they’re not going to walk into a hole, they can spot danger.”

What’s more interesting is that Scott believes that this sinkhole could have been forming for around 100 years after decades of rainfall slowly eroded the farm’s limestone rock foundations. After April’s intensive rainfalls, the rock’s last resistance ended that led to the opening of this uneven, 200-meter-long abyss.

The 20-meter deep hole showed the slow build-up and layering of rock, sediment and soil over incredibly long timescales. “What I see in the bottom of this hole is the original 60,000-year-old volcanic deposit that came out of this crater,” Scott told TVNZ. “Then there’s a stack of about 10 to 12 meters of sediment sitting on top of it from lakes that have formed in this crater. The top three meters is volcanic ash.”

Meanwhile, people were just thankful that the giant void didn’t swallow them inside. Farm assistant Gabriel Lafalla, who narrowly escaped from going down the sinkhole, told Stuff, “I could have died. I touched myself [the sign of the cross] and said to myself, ‘I’m alive’.”