Sinkholes spread concern in Türkiye’s parched breadbasket

Sinkholes have existed for centuries in Konya, a vast agricultural province known as Türkiye's breadbasket but their numbers have risen in recent years due to increasing drought and a subsequent overuse of groundwater for irrigation, according to experts.

Every time Turkish farmer Fatih Şık drives his tractor across his cornfields he knows the earth could open up and swallow him at any moment.

Two giant sinkholes have already appeared on his land in Konya.

"Anywhere could sink, I keep thinking. And I know I'd be dead at the bottom," the 45-year-old farmer told AFP.

"But I have to work otherwise my family will starve."

Many sinkholes are dizzyingly deep, plunging up to 50 meters (165 feet). Invisible from a distance, you can suddenly come upon them in the large fields of corn, beetroot, wheat and clover that dot the Konya plain.

"One of the major factors with sinkholes is climate change," says Arif Delikan, an associate professor of Konya Technical University, who has counted 640 sinkholes in Konya, with more than 600 of them in the Karapınar district alone.

"Around 20 holes have emerged over the past year in Karapınar," he said, using a hammer to test the ground around the edge of one.

He and the country's disaster agency identified more than 2,700 surface deformations and non-seismic fractures which indicate a sinkhole risk and need to be investigated.

Sinkholes occur where water dissolves the bedrock below the surface, causing it to cave in. They can form naturally or through "anthropogenic" causes, due to the direct or indirect action of people.

They can appear slowly or collapse very suddenly with little warning.

Last year, Adem Ekmekçi witnessed a large hole opening up which...