This crack in the earth is huge – more than seven football fields long and nearly a football field in width – and it appeared virtually overnight. Scientists are not sure what caused it, how it formed, or how much bigger it may get.
“A hunter stumbled on it when he was hunting there Oct. 1. And the next time anybody went out there, a few weeks later, there it was, this huge slide or crack or whatever it is.”
The crack appeared in a rural area, about 40 miles south of Ten Sleep in north central Wyoming, on state-owned land in the middle of a cattle ranch. The land began to crack in late September, but geologists were stunned to find it had developed from a mere crack in the ground to a veritable canyon in just weeks. Scientists think the crack could have been formed by groundwater leakage, landslide, or unusually dry deep earth.
A local hunter told reporters:
“I was stunned. The magnitude of this shift in Earth is dramatic. It blows you away to see it.”
Another hunter expressed his amazement at the size of the tear in the ground.
“It doesn’t make any sense, where it happened it’s just like the ground opened up, and the size of it is just huge!”
Scientists, of course, have seen gashes like this in the earth before – but never one this big.
People have been advised to stay away from the site because it is considered an active landslide and unsafe.
