Sinkhole swallows pond or pond swallows sinkhole? Neither one of the two sounds like a real-life event but rather like a scene from a science fiction movie. In Newcastle, Calif., however, the unrealistic science fiction movie scene was reality for Newcastle resident Mark Korb when he woke up on Sunday morning, reported KPLCtv on March 19, 2013.
When Mark Korb went to bed on Saturday night, his world, and his property, were still in order.
On Sunday morning, when he stepped outside, there was something missing. Something had disappeared over night. His entire pond was gone.
What happened to all the water, the plants, the fish? Instead of a pond, Mark Korb found nothing but a giant gaping crater on his property. "This looks like the moon," he says.
Mark Korb’s man-made pond was not small. The pond held enough water that when Mark Korb had to drain it before, it took seven days by using a pump.
Overnight, the pond’s water and everything else in it had disappeared in as little as four to five hours.
While it was evident that a giant sinkhole had swallowed up the pond, it was unclear as to how or why a sinkhole could swallow a pond so rapidly.
Solving the mystery took the expertise of a geology professor from nearby Sierra College who explained that the area used to be an old gold mining field. Unlike other sinkholes who are caused by too much rainwater, this sinkhole was due to the old mining activity or a fracture that preexisted underground.
It makes one wonder, what else lurks down there?
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