美国有线新闻 CNN 2013-03-06

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

"I heard a loud crash like car came into the house, and I heard my brother screaming, so I ran back there and tried going inside the room, but when I later turned the light on, all I see was a big hole, a big hole."

Jeremy Bush jumped into that hole to try to save his brother, but he couldn't find him. Officials called off their search on Saturday, partly because of the same reason why workers begin demolishing² the house. The sinkhole was expanding, and there were concerns the house might collapsed⁴ at any time. Sometimes sinkholes are smaller, they might cause the ground to sag⁵ or cause a small pond to form. Other times, they can be huge, like this one you're looking at right now from Guatemala, or the great blue hole, an underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize.

Florida actually gets a lot of sinkholes, that's because of the ground across a lot of the state is made up of limestone⁶, a sedimentary rock. Nick Valencia explains how that can lead to the sinkhole.

How do sinkholes form? Well, let's break this down for you here. Sinkholes are usually a naturally occuring event, then what happens is that rain water, that heavy rain water, sort of sits on top of that bedrock sanding clay. If you taken to account Florida's landscape, it has got a lot of that of very porous⁷ limestone, that allows the rain, the acidic rain to sort of percolated⁸ down into the soil, forming these cave like sinkholes here. And also, sometimes, it's drought that causes these cave-like formations. And that's further the punctuated⁹ by that heavy rain that sort of sits on top of there causing this to open up and perhaps some of the scarest scenarios¹⁰, that in Florida is that, you can not predict sinkholes, it's highly expensive to predict them yet, you have to use very expensive equipment. And it's really tough to pinpoint¹¹ where these sinkholes are. In fact, it's so common about the currents in Florida, all of these little blue dots from freckled¹² upon and down the state of Florida. Our past instances of sinkholes, now what happened on Thursday night and early Friday morning in Hillsboro County at the Bush residents, this is the place that the Florida department of state says is a susceptible¹³ to abruptly¹⁴ forming collapse³ sinkholes, it's an area that's dominated by an area that's had problems with sinkholes in the past.

分享到：