Turkey's Sinkhole Crisis

A grim, unstoppable, slow motion implosion.

Half of Turkey is subject to the formation of sinkholes. As the world has become hotter and dryer, more water is pumped for irrigation. When you hollow out an aquifer the weak spots may simply collapse. Turkey’s breadbasket now has 2,500 of them, and they’ve not yet killed, nor taken critical infrastructure, but it’s only a matter of time before a highway or a rail line is consumed.

This is also a problem in Florida, where it affects housing rather than farm land, and they’re much more likely to kill. Florida is pumping groundwater, too. Sinkholes were covered by homeowner’s insurance until 2011, but since then it’s been an additional rider expense. I’ve periodically come back to the Insurance Sector Collapse Process - Florida will eventually be forced to exchange crackpot MAGA policy for reality based risk remediation, but not until a lot of people lose property. This is going to get … interesting … if the Trump administration does indeed kneecap FEMA.

The situation for Turkey is different - no insurance and no policy beyond measuring the holes then putting up a fence and warning signs. That’s tolerable when accidents really ARE accidents, but when you’ve got a creeping problem that is guaranteed to get worse? You either share the risk, or you let individuals fail.

This isn’t a crisis in the sense that someone is going to make an epic two hour movie about it. But the desiccation driving this problem is happening in a geological blink of an eye - just three or four human generations. And it’s happening with every aquifer within reach of our species - the California Central Valley has subsided as much as 28 feet in some places in the century that we’ve been aggressively pumping ground water.

Like the Florida sinkhole video, the problems below the surface are enormous, the loss has already occurred. We just don’t notice until things visibly collapse right in front of us.