4 ms·
How come this was just discovered now? Given satelite coverage and the orweillian chinese government i would have expected that every square milimeter in china
by dtx1 4y ago
How come this was just discovered now? Given satelite coverage and the orweillian chinese government i would have expected that every square milimeter in china has been mapped, zoned and cataloged. Are there still parts of the world/china that are essentially undiscoveres country?
- boomboomsubban 4y agoIt's in a sinkhole, from a satellite image it would at most look like a valley of some sort. The world is massive, more so if you add things that are underground or under water.
- ajmurmann 4y agoHow comes nobody explored this till now? Even sinkholes in Yucatan that are known death traps have been relentlessly explored, including with autonomous submarines.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThere are a lot of caves, most of them with nothing noteworthy inside. Exploring a known deathtrap is more likely than some random hole in a rural mountain.
- ajmurmann 4y agoEven leaving satellite images out, I don't understand either how this only got discovered now. Is China so sparsely populated in some areas? I understand that not every place is like Europe where every square centimeter has been utilized by humans in some capacity throughout history, but even in comparatively empty US, I cannot imagine something huge like this only getting discovered now. Mexico has lots of sinkholes and there have been massive efforts to fully explore those, including autonomous submarines for mapping. Yet here is an enormous sinkhole in a country of 1 billion+ people and it gets "discovered"
- emmelaich 4y agoOne factor is that this is not in the same river system as the 29 already discovered large sinkholes in the area. This is from something called the Fugui underground river / water system. I'd guess that it had been discovered before though. Perhaps just not explored in detail, by a caving/karst research group.