Sinkholes often attract adrenaline lovers, because you can feel like the hero from the novel "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne. Such places can be reached only off-road or by helicopter. Take a look at the most spectacular natural or man-made craters on the face of the Earth.
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A huge sinkhole with a diameter of 105 feet (32 meters) and a depth of 164 feet (50 meters) on a farmer's field in the Shatkovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia.
© Photo : Press service of MChS of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast
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The Door to Hell, a burning natural gas field in Derweze, Turkmenistan.
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Looking down the 88-foot-deep Initiation well at Quinta da Regaleira near the town of Sintra, Portugal.
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The spillway at Monticello Dam in action.
CC BY-SA 4.0 / Jeremybrooks / The spillway at Monticello Dam in operation (cropped photo)
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The Kimberly Diamond Mine Museum in South Africa. This is where diamonds were discovered in 1879. De Beers eventually stopped mining the pit which was allowed to fill with water and dug shafts down into the diamond-bearing rocks below. They stopped mining altogether in 1914 and this is now part of a museum. The city of Kimberly is on the horizon. De Beers headquarters is still in Kimberly.
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A giant hole in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia has increased its size during last 3 years.
© Sputnik / Press service of the Governor of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
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Aerial view of the huge hole caused after a collapse in a sewage system in the neighborhood of San Antonio, north of Guatemala city, February 23, 2007. Three people went missing and hundreds were evacuated as a precaution against more possible collapses.
© AFP 2023 / Orlando Sierra