7 of the World's Most Stunning Sinkholes

Five lanes of road vanished in the Japanese city of Fukuoka in 2016 as a sinkhole nearly 100 feet wide and 50 feet deep sucked the pavement away and then promptly filled with water. What made this sinkhole most extraordinary was the fact that Japanese officials had the road repaired in a matter of days. But it all may have gone too quickly as more settling of the earth shifted the new roadway a few inches following repairs.

We know about the world's largest sinkhole thanks to a 1994 China Caves Project mapping, during which it was discovered. Thanks in part to an underground river in the forests of China, this double-nested sinkhole includes a waterfall in its depth of over 2,100 feet. The whole hole is 2,000 feet long and 1,760 feet wide. The upper bowl is over 1,000 feet deep and the lower bowl drops an additional 1,100 feet. 

Dean's Blue Hole in The Bahamas gets more fascinating as it goes down. Dropping 663 feet deep—the world's deepest known blue (ocean) hole— the circular opening of up to 115 feet in diameter widens to about 330 feet after only a drop of 66 feet. The root cause of Dean's Blue Hole is still unknown, but scientists thing it may have been caused by the erosion of limestone, a chemical reaction spurred on by the meeting and mixing of fresh and salt water. 

Eight Corvettes that fell away from the floor of the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky easily turned into some of the most famous vehicles in the museum. In 2014 a 60-foot by 45-foot hole dropped 30 feet deep and grabbed eight Corvettes in the process. Fortunately the cars were able to be recovered and the museum now celebrates the sinkhole by displaying those cars unwashed. 

Guatemala City and its decaying underground infrastructure has created more than one city's fair share of sinkholes, including a hole in 2010 that sucked down a three-story factory and killed 15 workers. The 65-foot-wide hole dropped 100 feet, made possible by broken sewer pipes and both water from a tropical storm and the movement from a volcanic eruption.

A beautiful circular diameter of nearly 1,000 feet gives us what is called the Great Blue Hole in Belize, one of the most impressive displays of sinking in the world. At over 400 feet deep, this sinkhole off the coast of Belize has clearer water the deeper you go, giving off visuals of underwater rock formations.

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou knows sinkholes, but it knows none bigger than one that developed in 2013 near a subway construction site that dropped about 30 feet deep but was about 1,000 square feet across, gobbling up five shops and part of another building. Luckily nobody was injured in the sinkhole formation.