By Tim Binnall
A powerful earthquake that rocked Croatia back in December is being blamed for a worrisome situation wherein sizeable sinkholes have subsequently appeared at an alarming rate over the last two months and now number nearly 100 in total. The bizarre crisis reportedly began a few days before the end of 2020 when a monstrous 6.4-magnitude tremor shook the country, killing five people and causing widespread damage. As residents set about recovering from the earthquake, they noticed that the event had caused several sinkholes to emerge around the epicenter of the disaster.
In one particular village, a whopping 15 of the chasms were found within 10 days of the earthquake and another 15 were documented in a nearby community. Chillingly, the number of sinkholes has only increased since then and it is not estimated that approximately 100 of the perilous pits have popped up in places dangerously close to homes and other buildings. Although the openings in the ground range in size, the largest one found to date measures a staggering 98 feet across and the deepest chasm is around 50 feet deep.
Understandably, residents of the region where the sinkholes keep appearing are living on edge, concerned that their property or residence could be the next location swallowed up by the spontaneously-forming chasms. Although scientists say that these pits would have formed eventually due to the geological makeup of the area, they observed that the earthquake accelerated their emergence by decades if not centuries. The fact that the sinkholes were an inevitability is, of course, little consolation to the people in Croatia living on the now-unstable ground.