This planet we live on can create amazing, breathtaking things like the Northern Lights, Machu Picchu and the Great Barrier Reef. But it’s also responsible for less lovely phenomenons, such as whacking great sinkholes that appear out of nowhere. And this isn’t just happening in wild, far-flung locations – in the last two months alone holes have appeared in Newcastle (20 foot across) and St Albans (20 metres across).
So what is behind these Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style hellmouth happenings? The BBC has a whistlestop explanation of how they are formed (spoiler: it’s not demons, but a combination of acidic groundwater and soluble rock). But as well as a hell of a shock, they present an opportunity for learning, both geological and beyond.
Primary
To understand exactly how the Earth can collapse in on itself, students need to know what is going on beneath their feet – so get them up to speed with the fact that the seemingly solid ground is actually constantly changing just below the surface. This lesson from the Hamilton Trust takes a snack-based approach to the topic, using a scotch egg (or boiled, if you prefer) to introduce students to the concept of the Earth’s crust, mantle and core, and how their movement affects the world around us.
For more edible background information, try using chocolate bars to teach students about different types of rock (no, really). This Chocolate Geology lesson from National Parks UK uses Mars bars as stand-ins for tectonic plates, Lion bars as sedimentary rock, Crunchies as igneous rock and a smushed Curly Wurly as metamorphic rock. Extra credit to anyone who manages not to eat them.
Once your class has mastered the basics of geology, it’s time to explore how the interaction of these materials means that you can suddenly have a humongous chasm to deal with. This lesson from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry gives a detailed description of the way groundwater creates sinkholes, offering scientific background, a group task to build a model of a limestone cave using sugar and sand, and a class discussion on how the process is affected by the water table.
Next, try getting your class to put themselves in the shoes of a newspaper reporter covering the story of a sinkhole. Show them this video of the ground swallowing commuters in South Korea and get them to write about it, using this lesson from TeachIt Primary to introduce the inverted pyramid structure for writing newspaper reports. This guide to writing headlines will help them to make sure their stories have maximum impact.
Or you could take a creative approach and produce some descriptive writing on the subject, using this Guardian gallery of sinkholes around the world as stimulus – this creative writing checklist from the Scottish Book Trust will give your class tips on penning a powerful story.
Secondary
Refresh older students’ memories of geology with these interactive lessons on how rocks are formed and the composition of calcium carbonate (limestone). Then it’s time to get down to an in-depth understanding of how sinkholes suddenly occur. This BBC News video offers explanations and diagrams of the causes, along with eyewitness accounts, footage and a look at the recent spike in their occurrence.
But the best way to understand the process is, of course, to create a model. This interactive lesson from Earth Learning Idea repurposes a takeaway container, rocks, sand and some Monopoly houses to look at the damage to communities when sinkholes get to work. And for a cross-section exploration of the same process, show students this video of a science project which uses sugar cubes, clay and water to create an impressive collapse.
For real-life examples, this lesson offers a wealth of useful contextual information and some jaw-dropping footage, including a Chinese pavement opening up and swallowing a woman and a sinkhole forming in Louisiana and making trees disappear – get students to discuss which they found most shocking, and why. It also includes tasks on the Guatemala sinkhole of 2010 – which gobbled an entire three-storey factory – asking students to imagine themselves as either the driver of a car in the affected area, or a factory worker nearby and create a first-person account. Use this writing-to-describe template to assist with the process.
That giant sinkhole also presents the authorities with a problem – how do you fill a 100-foot chasm? This article looks at two of the possible solutions – get students to use their mathematical prowess to work out figures involved. And for a longer project, set your students the task of researching how humans contribute to the problem, using this Guardian article as a starting point.
And finally, you can explore the psychology of why we are so terrified of sinkholes with neuroscientist Daniel Glaser. It’s slightly more complicated than “because it’s a giant gaping hole that appears out of nowhere”. But not much.
