Paynes Prairie, a big park on the edge of Gainesville, used to be a huge lake, covering over 21,000 acres (8,500 hectares), with big paddle steamers crossing it and coming up to the town itself. Then one day in 1891, an entry opened up to a huge sinkhole underneath it, and the entire lake drained away underground in two days, as if someone had pulled out the bathplug. Apparently there were dead fish for miles and the stench was something awful. Thank goodness for Nature's tidier-uppers, the vultures.
Now Paynes Prairie is a huge park with wild horses and bison, as well as alligators, snakes and birds - find out more at http://www.floridastateparks.org/paynesprairie.
Knowing my obsession with limestone, Mark and Meryl took me and their two delightful children to the Devil's Millhopper, a giant sinkhole in Florida's only Geological State Park. This sinkhole opened up 10-15,000 years ago, and is 120 feet deep and 500 across (about 37 by 150 metres). It's a lovely walk and very manageable climb down and back up an attractive stairway. The 12 springs that continue to flow out of the surrounding limestone form a series of small streams that meander across the sinkhole base then disappear down through deeper layers of limestone before entering the waters of the Ocala aquifer many meters below.
Houses do occasionally get swallowed up by new sinkholes, fortunately on a much smaller scale than Paynes and Millhopper - and sinkhole insurance is available, except in areas where the underlying cave systems are too close to the surface, making collapses more likely. An interesting land use planning issue to have to grapple with!
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