From the Vault: Sinkholes, Part 2

two of our discussion of sink holes. Now. In the last episode, we talked about some some fabulous examples of sinkholes that suddenly open up and reveal interesting things. Below, we talked about how sinkholes form, the geology and hydrology of sinkholes, and we talked about some interesting specific examples

in the world. But today we wanted to get into some things about the religious significance of sinkholes and sinkholes as a scientific tool that can help show us things about the past UH and also maybe some sinkholes in space.

But I thought sinkholes in religion would be a good place to start because one of the interesting ways of conceptualizing UH deities is that deities are often manifestations of natural forces and natural resources, and of course one of the most important natural resources is water, so there are all kinds of water deities around the world. Coastal civilizations and cultures will have deities associated with the ocean that

are very important in their culture. But if you're if you're more inland, there will often be deities associated with where you get your fresh water. Either are a very important river or they're even There are lots of holy wells that are found throughout the history of Europe, both Pagan and Christian. There are a lot of like holy wells and water sources, and the same is true of many sinkholes in ancient meso America. That's right, um, in particular the sacred senotes of the Maya, which is what

we'd like to talk about here. I was reading a piece, really nice piece on Mexico Lore dot co dot UK by Maya archaeologist Andrew kenkela Um just titled Sacred Sinkholes, and he discusses sum of what we've already mentioned in regard to, you know, the large number of these sinkholes of sinotes in Mesoamerica. The entire area is situated on a limestone bedrock, and we end up with with these hollows and then they collapse, and then of course then they often fill with water. But so yeah, your world

left with something. There's not just a deep pit, which alone can be pretty interesting, but pits with water often from deep underground, so you're often talking clean water, clear water an ideal source. Some of these contain as much as like fifty meters of water. Uh. He points out. Yeah, there are a lot of fascinating things about these sinkholes. One of which, just before I forget, I wanted to call attention to that they explore some of these uh

sinotes in the Yucatan Peninsula. In the documentary that we recently interviewed Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer about there, there's a segment where they so that documentary is called Fireball, and it's about impacts from space and the scars they leave on Earth and and what we can learn from them.

And one of the things they explore is if if you look at a map of the senotes of the Yucatan Peninsula, there's one part of the Yucatan where there's this almost perfect partial ring of sinotes and it's like, what's going on there? And that apparently corresponds to the outer rim of the crater that was left by the impact from the KPg extinction, the large space impact that probably contributed significantly to the extinction of the non avian

dinasas wars. And so in Fireball there's a segment where where Clive Oppenheimer goes down into one of these beautiful ancient senotes with a local researcher and and they talk about not just what it can tell is geologically we might get a little bit more into that later, but but also what it means religiously. Yeah, So, especially for areas far from rivers, these sonotes became very important for just purely practical reasons like this is where you could

get water. This enabled you to live and have you know, have have communities that existed further away from those rivers. But then they ended up taking on religious power as well. And can Tela writes that the ancient Maya regarded senotes as one of the three symbolic entry ways uh to Sibalba,

the Mayan underworld. So eventually this kind of he describes it as a senote cult emerges devoted to venturing out, like taking these pilgrimages to different senotes, collecting water from them from different different ones and making what offer rings

up to the watery depths. And their role these these priests, these pilgrims, their role would have been seen is vitally important, especially during times of drought, you know, when when the the resources of the son Nottes becomes uh, you know, in doubt or seems threatened, like they seem to have a role in in trying to maintain the balance, to

try and maintain the bountiful gifts of these places. I was also looking at an article on National Geographic titled Secrets of the Maya in the Other World, and this was by Alma Guillermo Prieto, and this is about the sinkholes, uh that we've been discussing here, and about how they were also associated with a key deity which was chock. I believe that it's spelled in this article is c h A A K. I've also seen it with a

with a C ch A C. I think. Yeah, So here's what they wrote in this article quote or this is just a really I think telling a passage from it. Quote for men like unkin the old gods are still very much alive, and Chock, ruler of sinotes and caves, is among the most important gods of all. For the benefit of living things. He pours from the skies, the water he keeps in earthenware, jars and caves. Chalk is one in many. Each thunderclap is a separate chock in action,

breaking a jar open and letting the rain fall. Each god inhabits a separate layer of reality, along with dozens of alternatively complacent and ferocious gods that live in the thirteen other worlds above and the nine other worlds below. Together, they filled the Maya people's lives with dreams, visions, and nightmares, a complicated calendar of agricultural times and fertility rituals, in a firm sense of the way things must be done. Chock had moved, Unkin said, and that meant the planting

season would soon arrive. That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, So in this we see that a cave or sinote could be seen as as a dwelling place of chalk, but it could also, can you know, be seen as this yawning mall of the earth, or even this gateway to deeper realms of reality. Yeah, and and this combines the multiple version, so you you can of course see these senotes as a gateway to the underworld and a source of water. But I was also reading in a different National Geographic

article um about like the the the specifics of certain senotes. Like, it's not just all senotes are religiously equivalent. There would be, for example, some senotes and specific locations that have different religious significance for the people who live nearby. The one I was thinking of was the a senote that, as the ancient mind city had a wall, there was like many senotes within the wall that could be used as

a water source. But there's one senote outside the city wall that it seems was regarded primarily as a place for the burial of the dead. And there have been many human remains found down inside that one. Yeah, yeah there, Yeah, they're they're a whole slew of them with different significance. Is the most famous of the sonotes, uh, it's probably the Sacred Sinote at the Maya site of Sanita, where there was this, it's been a place of of a

fair amount of study. There was a small building by it that was apparently used for blood sacrifices um, again tying into traditions related to the you know, the sacredness of the spot and the continuation of water. Variety of sacred objects were also apparently cast into the sinote, including precious jade artifacts, gold and copper disks, uh, foods, and other organic items that that we've we actually can find

you know, evidence of. But uh, yeah, so you think of this as like an opening up into the world below where you might throw offerings, where you might make sacrifices of material or sacrifices of blood. It's hard for me not to sort of connect this to some of the stuff we were talking about in the previous episode where there is a pretty your link between pumping too

much groundwater up. You know, like there's certain places where there's a need for for massive irrigation of fields maybe sometime to like protect a certain crop from frost or something, so you will pump just tons and tons of water just to put over the fields so so so much that you really lower the level of the groundwater and suddenly cause lots of sinkholes to to open up where the suddenly the you know, the water pressure is not what it was below the overburden can't hold up its

own weight and then collapses. And this has happened in the US in places like Florida. I mean, it could be it's very easy to see how something like that could be interpreted as as the wrath of the gods, right, yeah, absolutely, yeah, you're you're messing with the domain of the the earth gods. Now.

One of the interesting things about these Mesoamerican traditions concerning sinots is that it's also thought that that native people's um elsewhere in the America has probably carried some of these, uh, these ideas with and so when you encounter of some North American sinotes, there's there's evidence of that these areas that native peoples may have used them as burial places as well given them, um, you know, places of importance in their worldviews. And one such place is Devil Sinkhole

northwest of San San Antonio. Um it's now a state park, but it's a hundred and forty ft deep or forty three meters deep, and um uh yeah, apparently there's evidence that ancient people's came here and probably held it in some esteem. But one of the really crazy natural world things about Devil Sinkhole is that it is home to or at least part of the year, it is home to three million Mexican freetailed bats. Wow, that's a lot

of bats. Yeah, so they migrate to Mexico for the cooler months, but they roost up in the sinkhole other parts of the year. And we've we've talked about how amazing bats are in the show before and especially especially insectivore uh bats you know that eat insects. Well, it's been estimated that the bats that live in Devil Sinkhole again something like three million Mexican freetail bats that they consume un estimated thirty tons of beetles and moths each night,

each night, thirty tons, thirty tons beetles and moths. That's crazy. That's one of those facts that makes you wonder how many tons of beetles they're just are already? Like, is that is that half the beetles in the area? Is that one percent of the beetles in the area. Yeah, I mean, it's just a tremendous biomass out there, and these bats are here for it um and most of it is insect or arthur pod in some way, or you know, most of the animal is is arthur pod

in some way, and wow, that's just amazing. You can measuring insects or beetles in units of like garbage truck fulls. So I love this because, yeah, this is a great example of just sort of how like we said in the last episode, when a sinkhole occurs, it does not you know, create this natural void. Like. Things will move into the sinkhole, things will take advantage of this new um aspect of the geography, and in this case, the

bats make it their home. So if you if you've lived in the San Antonio area, you've visited there, and you've been to two Devil sinkhole, I'd love to hear, uh, hear about your experience checking it out. I know, if you go during the right time of the year, you can actually observe the bats like, uh, moving in and out of the of the cavern area. So uh, it

sounds beautiful. I've read that there are also I mean, one of the things is that belief in the sacredness of of sinkholes and and their association with the world of the gods is not just an ancient belief, it's not necessarily extinct. I mean there are people today for whom sinkholes hold sacred importance, and if if you, if you are one of those people or know some, I'd

like to hear about that too. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to hear, especially the details about any modern rights associated with it, and and just of the belief system built up around it, you know, the stories than Now, one of the things we mentioned in the previous episode is that the sink whole is a natural feature that can inadvertently serve as a type of scientific instrument, much in

the same way that like ancient ice. You know, it's like nobody intended it to be this way, but we can learn things about the ancient climate from taking ice cores, so that you know, those layers of ice really give us a lot to read into the history of the Earth. And apparently sinkholes can do the same thing, right, that's right.

I mean, you know, we think about how they gobble up parts of the surface world, and yeah, they do sometimes do scientists a huge favor by collecting and to some degree preserving evidence of past life forms, even past like storm activity and and and climates of ancient times. Uh. And so when we ventured into the sink whole. With the right tools or with the right methods, we're able

to uncover those secrets that have been reserved there. And they've just been There've been numerous studies that have looked at sinkholes and uh and gathered specific information from from these sinkholes, and we're not gonna be able to give a full overview of them here in this episode, but I wanted to touch on some that I thought provided a reasonable overview and in an idea of what sort

of stuff we can learn from sinkholes. So uh, there's the For instance, in two thousand fourteen, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne studied genetic information extracted from the tooth of an adolescent girl who fell into a sinkhole in the Yucatan some twelve thousand to thirteen thousand years ago, and this with her remains were

found alongside the remains of ancient beasts. Because you know, what what occurs is some of these really treacherous sinkholes, is like things will fall in and then they cannot get out, and of course they die down there. They decay down there, and the remains are down there for us to later discuss ever in study. Oh, I hadn't thought about this, but I wonder if sinkholes are one of these things, one of these terrain features that can

serve as a natural predator trap. Um. A predator trap is, I guess, a concept in the interaction between the landscape and and the animals that live nearby. But you know, a classic example is like the Librettar pits. You know, so a an animal becomes stranded and dies in it, and then the smell attracts predators or scavengers who then

themselves become trapped. Another example I was reading about not too long ago was there is a geologically active valley in the cum Chotka Peninsula where often like birds are killed by volcanic fumes, and then their decaying bodies attract predators into the area, who then also are killed by the fumes, and it leads to this feedback cycle. Yeah, yeah, it's uh. I think in some cases they definitely are

serving as predator traps um. So in this particular study, one of the reasons this tooth was so important is that the researchers were studying the influx of humans into the America's and wanted to see of a specimen such as this with a skull shape that was that is

unusual among other Native American lineages. They wanted to see if it fell in line genetically with those lineages or represented something else, perhaps lining up with theories about migration from Southeast Asia or even Australia that didn't come in through the bearing straight um. And they found that their remains did line up with with the bearing straight or

Barringian migration. So that's just one cool example. Okay, let's hear another, all right, Yeah, here's one from nineteen Researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History looked at the preserved bones of a Craton's carcara and an extinct carrion eating falcon from the Caribbean that was killed off roughly a thousand years ago when humans first entered the region.

And they were looking at these remains in a flooded sinkhole um on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, and the whole is a amill sink, a a hundred foot deep, dark, oxygen free environment that preserved the two thousand, five hundred year old bones of this creature enough that they could they could conduct genetic studies of it. In fact, the bone yielded ninety eight point seven percent of the bird's

mitochondrial genome, which is pretty impressive. Again, it's like it's like a deep cooler, you know, it preserves these remains, uh that if they were dropped, you know, in other places on the world, would have just been long lost, no ice required. UM. Here's another one of note. In two thousand and eighteen, another study from the University of Illinois, your Banno Champagne studied the remains of a giant sloth that fell into a sinkhole in what is now Carriblanca

in central Belize twenty seven thousand years ago. And in this the tooth, humorous and femur were partially fossilized, but there was still enough unaltered tissue for stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis to study what the slow off eight. And this in turn revealed details about local climate and local environment there in that region at that time, which is pretty pretty astounding. Did did it say exactly what the sloth did eat? Um? I didn't get into the

the the nuts and berries of that. Basically, suffice to say, I'd love to come back and discuss um. Uh, giant ground slots more in the future though, But but basically it provided them the the information they needed to, you know, to actually gaze back in the past and consider, you know, what it was consuming, and that means what was around it, what was you know, how it was able to make its home in in the world at that time. So

it's pretty amazing. We could probably do a whole episode or series of episodes just on really interesting studies finding out what ancient peoples and creatures eight using analyses and chemical analyses of these kinds. Yeah, I mean it reveals

so much, so much. Absolutely. One I was just reading not too long ago that was kind of funny to me was, um, was a chemical analysis of a gigantic copper light found I think it was around the city of York in England that revealed it was left by a human I think like a thousand years ago or so, you know, roughly, and revealed a diet heavy and meat and bread, but also just just riddled with intestinal worms.

So then you get the double You have the fossilized poop, but then the fossilized creatures that were writhing inside it. But I guess if it's about a thousand years ago. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that counts as fossilized. I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know. So it was, you know, poop from hundreds of years ago, so you know, roughly around a thousand years ago. But is that technically a fossil or is that just very well preserved poop. We'll have to come back and discuss

in the future. Okay. Um, here's a two thousand twenty study from go Through University in Frankfort. They dove into one of the most impressive sinkholes in the world, the Blue Hole. I believe we mentioned this um in the

last episode, at least in Passing Uh. This is a flooded cart sinkhole on Lighthouse Reef in Belize and they were able to to to drill up and analyze a sedimentary quote storm archive covering two thousand years of history, built layer by layer by layer in the dark depth of this whole, and it revealed a lot about the

frequency of tropical storms in the area. Over time. They found quote hurricanes in the Caribbean became more frequent in their force varied noticeably around the same time that classical mind culture in Central America suffered its final demise. So again just a chance to do gaze back in time and see what what was going on, um, you know, with the climate and with weather patterns by looking into

the sinkhole. So is the suggestion there. I assume it's not totally known, but the suggestion there may be that the organizational decline of the mind Civilis station was in some ways possibly related to changes in weather patterns. That's my understanding that it would have would have impacted UH, that that civilization UH and would have potentially contributed. Yeah.

I also ran across a two thousand seventeen study from the University of Hawaii at Manoa that looked into uh uh Makawai Cave and Kauaii, the largest limestone cave in y and only accessible via a sinkhole. So it's a it's a rich fossil site providing insight into Hawaiian life. The sinkhole Paleo Lake contains ten thousand years of sedimentary information, revealing a rich diversity of natural information as well as

Polynesian artifacts. So in this study they were able to find supporting evidence in the coral fragments there to discover the source of the mega earthquake UH in the Aleutian Islands that spawned the devastating fifteen eighties six tsunami that hit uh sen Riku, Japan. And so uh, you know again, it's it goes beyond merely being able to go in and find the remains of creatures, you know, which is I think the first place your mind goes when you

think about sinkholes. But able to to be able to go in there and find some some shattered bits of coral and then compare that to um two other bits of information and sort of piece together like seismic activities that occurred centuries ago. And I have I have one more here. This one's really fun too. Back in v a twenty five thousand year old sinkhole in Wyoming Natural

Trap Cave and Big Horn Canyon was found. It measured fifteen feet across about eighty five ft deep, and when they went into it, they discovered fossils of mammoths, short faced bears, camels, and um collared limmings. But they ended up boarding it up after that for thirty years to

prevent accidental falls. Because the Natural Park Service I was reading describes that Uh, this particular sinkhole is quote virtually impossible to see until it is directly underfoot, and if you look at pictures of it, yeah, it looks because if you fell, like it widens out underneath, so you wouldn't like skid along the side of this or even like it would just you would just plummet down to the bottom. Yeah. It's not a cone. It's not even a cylinder. It's like a jug with the with the

you know, bottle opening. Yeah, so it's it's very impressive. You should look it up. They have some wonderful pictures of it in the National Park Service does. But so, yeah, they ended up bordering it up, boarding it up for thirty years. But when scientists finally got a chance to dig in again, they discovered numerous large prehistoric mammal bones and even complete skeletons of smaller mammals, and they said that it ultimately functioned like a refrigerator, even preserving collagen

and some of the bones. It wound up containing a whopping thirty thousand specimens, they say, And on top of this, scientists are still studying what the cave can reveal about ancient human migration, ancient climate. So again, just another cash of information shan about about the past that we find in one of these sinkholes. Now, I'm sorry if I

missed this. Do they know if this this huge cache of different animal specimens, is that a result of some kind of natural deposition process, or is that the result of humans like humans putting animal remains into the sinkhole? Um? My understanding is that this would have been animals accidentally falling in over over the ages. Um. But it could be wrong on that. Um. There's I guess it's possible that that some of these bodies would have been thrown in.

But uh, my impression was that we were dealing with with things that had had made the very mistake that the Natural National Park Service was was warning about, you know, that it being virtually impossible to see it until it's directly underfoot. Like you've got to do a real dexterity saving throw to avoid fall into the bottom of this baby, Yeah, at disadvantage? Yes? Thank? Okay, Well I've got another one

for you. Obviously, it would be bad to suddenly plunge down into a sinkhole unwittingly on Earth, But what if you were to do it in space? Oh? Wow? Well, that would be even worse. Well, actually you might think so, but I just I just now thought of a condition that would make it maybe not nearly as bad. I don't know what we'll get into that. I mean, I would hate to fall into a sinkhole like the one

we just described in general. But what if then you I mean, because if you get to the bottom, what you're injured, maybe you maybe you're gonna starve to death, or you know, dive your wounds or dive exposure down there. Maybe there's a recently uh fall an animal down there you can you can eat, or maybe there's something down there that is going to eat you. There's so many horrible ways it could go. But space is a lonely place to die. So I don't know how true that is.

So I want to talk about a space object, an object called comment six P Trumov Garasimenko. Now, this comment is called sixty seven P because it is the sixty

seven periodic comment discovered in our solar system. It was found in nineteen sixty nine at an observatory in Russia by an astronomer named Klim Ivanovich Churyumov from a photographic plate that was taken by some fed Lana Ivanova Garasimenko and like I said, as a periodic comment, meaning that it's a comment with a relatively short orbit that we've

documented repeatedly returning to the inner Solar system. Some comments, you know, they're just way way out there and they're never going to get close to the Sun, so we don't really have any chance to get a good look

at them. This is one of the ones that comes in at one angle of its of its orbit, pretty close to the Sun, and astronomers have of course cited it a bunch of times since it was first discovered, since it comes around every six and a half years or so, if you've seen pictures of a comet up close, there's a good chance it was this one. Uh. It's it's kind of l shaped, or sort of like a bent barbell with a very short handle. It has these two lobes of frust or rocky icy material and its nucleus.

It also kind of looks like a bent double mushroom. It probably originally came from the Kuiper Belt, which is a large loose collection of icy objects that extends far

out past the orbit of Neptune. So if you go out past all of the planets, you know, you go past the gas giants, past Neptune, into the realm of Pluto, and then from there on out there's just sort of this big shell around the Solar System of of space, and these icy objects that if they're perturbed in just the right way, if they get flung off of their their deep orbital path and thrown down into the inner Solar System, they can become these familiar periodic comets. And

that appears to be what happened to Six. It was probably flung on this path that occasionally brings it close to the Sun when long ago it was subject to a collision or gravitational disturbance by some other object. At its biggest dimensions, it's a little over four pometers or about two point five miles long and wide, so it would be big enough to walk on, but not nearly

as big as a planet or even a moon. Now we know a lot about six and have great pictures of it because it was the target of the e s A, the European Space Agency Rosetta mission, which actually landed a probe on the surface of this comment and took a bunch of amazing photos. Among other things, Uh, and there's a lot that's really interesting about this comment. There's likely one amazing short video or gift that you've seen from its surface, and this was made out of

a series of still images taken by the lander. That's that we're sequenced together into an animation where it looks kind of like there's a snowstorm or a blizzard raining down onto the surface. Rob have you seen this animation before, Yes, it's really amazing. Now it does need some qualification that this is not actually a snowstorm like we would experience here on Earth. Uh. And the animation that we see

is a sped up animation. It takes something I think like twenty five minutes of original uh you know, time lapse between the different photos, and compresses it into a few seconds of of panning camera shot. So it's not actually a snowstorm, but probably more like the movements of dust particles and the star field as the comet travels. But it's still just one of the most strange and beautiful images I've seen made out of photos taken by

space probe. Yeah, I mean, it's it's absolutely other worldly. Now, there are a lot of things that were interesting about the Rosetta mission, including the ways that the Rosetta mission kind of went wrong. Do you do you remember this when it was trying to put the phile a lander down on the surface of the comet, and how it kind of bounced in a way it wasn't supposed to. I I remember, I remember this being a point in

the news around the time it happened. Yeah. Yeah, So the so the Rosetta mission had it had a lander that separated from the orbiter craft, and then the lander was supposed to touch down on the surface of the comet, and I believe it was supposed to fire these harpoons that would lock get into the surface so it didn't float away again, because again, thinking about the gravity of a comet, uh, it's mass is so small compared to the kind of gravity we're used to on planets or

moons that you can quite easily drift away from it if you've really got any momentum at all. I believe I read that the escape velocity from this commet was one meter per second. So if you're you know, moving away from its center of mass at one meter per second or more, you're not going to fall back down.

You're just gonna keep drifting away. But anyway, what I think happened with the lander was that it was supposed to fire these harpoons to lock it into the surface, but that didn't work correctly, so instead it kind of bounced after it touched the surface, and then bounced a couple of times and eventually came to rest under a cliff. Because remember this is not like a spherical commet, but it's kind of bent l shaped with these round edges.

It came to rest under some kind of cliff or overhang, the shadow of which mostly blocked the solar panels that were supposed to power the lander. So then that led to you know, uh laed to it not having enough power to do all the things it wanted to do. But despite that, there was still a huge amount of um really great science that came out of the rosett

emission and these wonderful photographs. And one of the interesting findings about this comet sixty s P that I wanted to mention this was from a NASA press release from September of called comet discovered to have its own northern lights. Uh this was actually revealed with the help of NASA instruments that were part of the essay Rosette emission. What they found was that the comet has this invisible glow.

It has an aurora of far ultra violet radiation. Uh. These findings were published in Nature Astronomy of last year, and this electromagnetic glow was an aurora much like we see in the polar regions of Earth. So on Earth, the northern and southern lights are created when charged particles from the Sun collide with gas particles in our upper atmosphere, and this results in reactions that create patterns of green, red, and white across across the sky. Other planets in the

Solar System also have a rural phenomenon. Jupiter does, I think even Mars does. Mini planets, but this is the first time we've ever observed it surrounding a comet. And quote from the press release here quote electrons streaming out in the solar wind. The stream of charged particles flowing out from the Sun interact with the gas in the comets coma, breaking apart water and other molecules. The resulting atoms give off a distinctive far ultraviolet light, invisible to

the naked eye. Far ultra violet light has the shortest wavelengths of radiation in the ultra violet spectrum, which makes me wonder if this comet could give you a sunburn. But anyway, I want to get around to the main study. I wanted to talk about tying into our our overall theme today. So this is a study published in Nature by Jean Baptiste Vincent at All called large heterogeneityse and commets et seven p as revealed by active pits from

sinkhole collapse. So the authors here talk about how a lot of times when we get a look at the surface of a cometary nucleus, that's the hard icy core of the comment. Remember comment has so it's got a hard core that's made of like ice and dust, the part you could walk on, and then it's surrounded often by sort of cloud or tail. The coma is made of water, vapor, dust and gas. And when they get a look at this hard nucleus of a comet, we

often observe pits. Now, there's one way that that might not be surprising, because if you think about other objects in the Solar System, like the Moon or asteroids the dwarf planet like series, they have a lot of pits also,

and these are quite clearly impact craters. As these objects are bombarded by space junk over millions of years, these pits accumulate, and if the planets or moons don't have active geology like volcanoes and plate tectonics to repeatedly pave and smooth over the surface, the pits from ancient impacts just sit there and they stay there, and we can see them easily. But there is a problem with explaining

the pits on commets as impact creators. First of all, our best guests about how often commets encounter large impacts does not seem to correlate with the number of pits that we see. And then second, when we try to create physical models of what would happen when a comet suffered a high speed impact, these models just don't create pits like the ones we actually observe. So what's making

the pits? Uh? Some researchers have hypothesized that the pits are a result of internal explosions of some kind, But in the words of the author's quote, the driving process remains unknown. Uh So do we have any better guesses? Well, according to this study, yes we do. Zarab. I want you to look at this next picture picture I've got

for you here. This is a picture of Commet six seven shared by the E s A. And if you look at this comment from a close orbit under the right conditions, you can see what look kind of like shafts of light, almost like those Spielberg lights, you know, from Steven Spielberg movies. He loves these God lights, the shafts of light piercing through a dusty patch of air or you know, cutting through different obstacles in the foreground.

You see these shafts of light blasting out of the surface of the comet, like it makes me think of Indiana Jones saying, you know, lightning, fire power of God or something. Yeah, yeah, it does bring to mind the you know, the fires of the art or or the lights of you know, the UFOs, the very spaceships that

are that they are encountered in Spielberg films. So I was reading an article about this study by phil Plate the Bad Astronomer, at his blog on sci Fi, and he highlighted this image in particular, the one you're looking at now, rob in connection with the subject matter the study. This photo is taken from a distance of about a hundred and seventy seven kilometers. And the point of it is that what's being shown in these shafts of light in the image is not actually lightning or fire a

power of God. They're not actually shafts of light. It is actually jets of water vapor that are gassing out from the surface of the comet and being illuminated by the sunlight. And I've got another photo for you to look at this up close of these jets. It truly does look amazing. Yeah, it creates this feeling that it is glowing or emitting energy. Um what whicheness since it

is emitting energy here. Uh, but yeah, it creates these are very these are beautiful images like these would not look out of place, like framed on the wall of some sort of you know, trendy uh you know in New York eatery or something. Yeah, I agree. I mean they have an almost artistic quality with their their real photos. So scientists believe these jets are caused in the following way. A large part of the nucleus of a comet is

made of water ice. As a comet with an irregular orbit gets to that part of its orbit closest to the Sun, of course, the ice in its crust heats up and it melts or its sublimates, it vaporizes, turns into a gas, and these jets we see in the photos, this is the water vapor that is being exhaled into space by the crusty lobes. But here's where all of

the different subjects we've been talking about come together. What we have recently observed in these images is that many of these jets seem to be shooting directly from the mysterious pits in the surface of the comet. Now what does that mean. Well, the authors of this study in Nature conclude that the pits are probably sinkholes, sinkholes in space. Well, that makes sense given what we've just discussed about the

water vapor jetting out of them. Right, it is leaving a hollow and uh, and that's the very kind of situation that on on Earth can lead to a sinkhole exactly right Now, These wouldn't be caused by the exact same process as natural sinkholes on Earth, just because it wouldn't involve things like rain, drainage and such. But it's pretty close. It's it's almost exactly the same thing. And what you're what you're saying rob is exactly correct. So

the hypothesized mechanism works like this. The comet travels into the inner parts of its orbit so it gets close to the sun. Heat from the sun warms the comet, turning the ice into water vapor, and apparently sometimes this heat penetrates the surface, sublimating large pockets of ice underneath the top layer of the comet, and then the water vapor gets blasted off into space, leaving these voids or

caves underneath the surface where the ice used to be. Eventually, the overburden lying above these evaporated comet caves can't support itself and it collapses, leaving a pit. And this can create an interesting feedback cycle because now that there's a pit, radiation from the Sun can pin to trade deeper into the surface of the comet, warming even more ice below, which is why we see jets of water vapor shooting

out of the pits themselves. These are sort of hot spots where the solar radiation can access pockets of ancient ice and heat them up very fast. The author's right quote here. We report that pits on Comet six Triuma of Garrisimenko are active and probably created by a synk whole process, possibly accompanied by outbursts. We argue that after formation, pits expand slowly in diameter owing to sublimation driven retreat of the walls. Therefore, pits characterize how eroded the surface is.

A fresh commentary surface will have a ragged structure with many pits, while an evolved surface will look smoother. The size and spatial distribution of pits imply that large heterogeneitys exist in the physical, structural, and compositional properties of the first few hundred meter is below the current nucleus surface. So what they're saying there is that there's also probably a way to tell how old the pits are and how old the surface of the comet is by looking

at these pits. Over time, the vaporization of ice eroads and smooths over the walls of the pit. So if you're looking at a comet, uh, the older a comet sinkhole is, the smoother its walls and the shallower its pits become. And very new pits in in less evolved comets are the ones with very steep, straight walls. It's kind of the exact opposite of like how human faces age, right, So a very old piece of comet terrain that's been

exposed to the sun many times. I guess would probably have a smoother surface with shallower pits, and one where the pits are fresh. It's gonna be craggier. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting. But but but, like you said, this is essentially a sinkhole in space, and not even in the most likely place you might think to find it,

not on a planet, but on the surface of a comet. Now, the one reason I said maybe, actually it wouldn't be quite as bad to fall into a sinkhole in space, at least in this example, is that the gravity of the comet is so low that when you fell into the sink whole, you wouldn't fall very fast, so you'll probably be fine when you hit the bottom. Yeah, or maybe you can catch an upward boost on one of those jets right right. It sounds like a great place

for an action scene to take place. Yeah, Ice pirates to sinkhole City. I think all city sounds great. That sounds like exactly like the kind of place you'd want to wind up in and um like a space noar kind of a um you know fiction. Yeah, sinkhole City, I like it. Well, we've I feel like we've really expanded even more on the idea of the sinkhole and hopefully worked a little more to to rescue the sinkhole from the what you call it, the the the the

section at the bottom of blogs. The chum box. Chum box. That's not a word of Mike Pointage. That's like a well known term. I think it was a term innovated by somebody who wrote, like a I don't know, like a Gawker article or something about them a long time ago, about like how they're put together and what's in them. But yeah, that that that is not a term original to me, but I think it is a very good term.

It's an apt description. Yeah, returning, I guess it's referring to the kind of like a slurry of meat that you throw out of a boat to attract sharks. Yes, exactly, that is exactly what those boxes are. They're just like kind of throwing rotten garbage out there to see what comes up. Yeah, and the sinkhole deserves better. The sinkhole is far more interesting. Yet. Yeah, certainly they do, uh,

they do have this this visceral impact on us. Just this again, this idea of the earth opening them up, opening up and swallowing his whole, or exposing dark realms beneath the earth. But but there's much more beyond that, much more than just sheer terror titilation. So hopefully we've we've you know, urged everyone out there too to uh,

you know, respect the sinkhole a little bit more. And obviously, yeah, we'd love to hear from anybody out there, you know, if you've traveled any of these sinkholes we've mentioned, if you've been to impressive sinkholes that we didn't get into in these episodes, um, or you just have general thoughts

about them, we would love to hear from me. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just asked the you rate, review, and subscribe if the platform allows you to do so. Huge thanks as always

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