Perhaps a subway tunnel below?
When it grows up, it will be #3 on this page. 
I read that as if that picture would be of the president of Guatemala office, I just pictured him at the bottom of the pit, dirty with long mangy hair, dressed in rags, surrounded by gnawed bones and barking half intelligible orders to a group of ministers around the perimeter of the sinkhole.
Looks like someone divided by zero
Yep. Divided by zero alright. {{{shudder}}}
(er, for the one or two of you who haven’t seen that, it’s called a glory hole. Yes, a glory hole. If you want to find more images, make sure Google Image Search settings are set to strict (er, if you’re at work, that is), and just to be careful make sure no one is filming an interview across the room.)
Definitely real in my opinion. Look at picture no 2 in the OP link. You can see that the shape of the hole matches perfectly with picture 1. It was clearly taken from the street that leads up the picture from the hole - perhaps from the large building with the white roof, judging by the angle.
The house with the curved red and white wall around the yard is on the lower left corner of the intersection in picture 1. You can see the broken service pipes in the wall of the hole. Likewise, the patching on the asphalt matches perfectly - note the prominent L-shaped lighter patch on the nearside of the hole in picture 2, which is visible above the hole in picture 1.
These features are all also visible in the photo linked to by cardinal_fang.
The area I live in was heavily mined for coal up until the 70’s and I sometimes wonder what sort of instabilities they have created in the ground our homes rest on.
I think it’s a photo mix-up. I remember the story of a giant sink hole from several years ago, and it is real. It has nothing to do with the current tropical storms.
Have you all seen photos of blue holes? Sinkholes in the ocean.
I think that Japanese “pizza” is more frightening than the sinkhole.
Our house (actually the whole row) was nearly swallowed by a collapsing mine running under the row. The ECB’s mining engineers nearly shat themselves. Cement mixers blocked the road into Wigan: they were coming from all over Lancashire and Yorkshire, dumping their contents down the minehead, then turning back for more.
Googleimage search, shows many more photos from different angles of the same sinkhole…looks legit.
If you look at photos of other massive sinkholes you’ll find the walls are also often smooth. This one is comparable to the 2007 sinkhole and yes, but is even deeper. The Cenote Zacaton in Mexico holds the current record for the deepest. As of 2007, no one had successfully reached the bottom (that may have changed.)
It makes me so sad that every freaking photo in the news in challenged these days with the assumption that all the major news outlets would be fooled by a Photoshop. People just dismiss things out of hand without doing the research.
ETA: It looks like someone did gt to the bottom. It’s over 300 meters (meters!) deep.
I blame the Large Hadron Collider.
That annoys the fuck out of me too. I call it “Revtim’s Law” that whenever a photo is posted of something odd, someone will say something like “that’s the worst photoshopping I’ve ever seen”, even when the pic is completely unaltered.
Nobody said anything about how bad the photoshopping was in this particular thread, so the law was broken here.
There’s another sinkhole from a couple of years ago (I think) that shows up in those images as well. They aren’t all the same sinkhole.
Remind me never to move to Guatemala. This sort of thing seems alarmingly common down there.
I didn’t say they were all the same sinkhole. I said there were more photos of the same sinkhole. Jeez, you people try to nitpick every little post and most of the time make asses out of yourselves! :rolleyes:
Does it have any synonyms? Because I’d like to learn more about… those things, and I really really don’t even wanna type glory hole into my search engine.
You might be safe if you type “sinkhole” and “geology”. Wiki says can try “cenote”, “swallet”, or “doline”. (I wouldn’t recommend their other terms because “swallow hole” might cause the same kind of NSFW problems.) Some sinkholes, like the Mexican one I mention above, the Cenote Zacaton, are super old and created over long periods of time.
The “Glory Hole” that looks like a giant drain sucking up water is a specific man-made thing at the top of a dam.
I think they agree; that’s why it’s #2 on the list.