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Science

Black Hole’s Deep Gravitational Sinkhole Twists Unlucky Star Into Donut Shape

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This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

A Deep Gravitational Sinkhole Swallows Unlucky Bypassing Star

Black holes have such a voracious gravitational pull that they even swallow light. This makes them hungry monsters lurking in the eternal darkness. There’s no escape if you happen to stumble across one in the inky blackness of space. That’s no worry for astronauts who have yet to travel farther than the Moon. But entire stars can face that peril if they wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hubble astronomers got a front-row seat to such an interstellar demolition derby when they were alerted to a flash of high-energy radiation from the core of a galaxy 300 million light-years away. Like a police officer arriving quickly at the scene of an accident, Hubble vision was trained on the mayhem before the collision was over. Hubble is too far away to see the doomed star getting sucked in. Instead, Hubble astronomers took the fingerprints of starlight coming from the mishap. These spectra tell a forensic story of a star falling into a cosmic blender. It was shredded, and pulled toward the black hole like a piece of stretched taffy. This process formed a donut-shaped ring of gas around the

This sequence of artist’s illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star.
1. A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy.
2. The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field.
3. The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart.
4. The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

Hubble Finds Hungry Black Hole Twisting Captured Star Into Donut Shape

Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole’s gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation.

Astronomers using

These are termed “tidal disruption events.” But the wording belies the complex, raw violence of a black hole encounter. There is a balance between the black hole’s gravity pulling in star stuff, and radiation blowing material out. In other words, black holes are messy eaters. Astronomers are using Hubble to find out the details of what happens when a wayward star plunges into the gravitational abyss.

Hubble can’t photograph the AT2022dsb tidal event’s mayhem up close, since the munched-up star is nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have recorded a star’s final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Lead Producer: Paul Morris

About 100 tidal disruption events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes. NASA recently reported that several of its high-energy space observatories spotted another black hole tidal disruption event on March 1, 2021, and it happened in another galaxy. Unlike Hubble observations, data was collected in X-ray light from an extremely hot corona around the black hole that formed after the star was already torn apart.

“However, there are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there’s a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra,” said Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (

The Hubble spectroscopic data are interpreted as coming from a very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star. This area, known as a torus, is the size of the solar system and is swirling around a black hole in the middle.

“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. We’re seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that’s being projected towards us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light),” said Maksym. “We really are still getting our heads around the event. You shred the star and then it’s got this material that’s making its way into the black hole. And so you’ve got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you’ve got what you actually see. This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown.”

The results were reported during a press conference on January 12, 2022, at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. 

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.



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World

Chile seeks to sanction those responsible for sinkhole near copper mine

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The mysterious hole of 36.5 meters (120 feet) in diameter that emerged in late July has provoked the mobilization of local authorities and led the mining regulator Sernageomin to suspend operations of a nearby mine owned by Canada’s Lundin in the northern district of Candelaria.

“We are going to go all the way with consequences, to sanction, not just fine,” mining minister Marcela Hernando said in a press release, adding that fines tend to be insignificant and the ruling must be “exemplary” to mining companies.

Chilean authorities have not provided details of the investigation into causes of the sinkhole.

Local and foreign media showed various aerial images of the huge hole in a field near the Lundin Mining operation, about 665 kilometers (413 miles) north of the Chilean capital. Initially, the hole, near the town of Tierra Amarilla, measured about 25 meters (82 feet) across, with water visible at the bottom.

The Canadian firm owns 80% of the property, while the remaining 20% is in the hands of Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd and Sumitomo Corp.

The minister added that although the country’s mining regulator had carried out an inspection in the area in July, it was not able to detect the “over-exploitation.”

“That also makes us think that we have to reformulate what our inspection processes are,” she said.

In a statement, Lundin said the over-exploitation referred to by the minister had been duly reported.

“We want to be emphatic that, to date, this hypothesis as reported by Sernageomin has not been determined as the direct cause of the sinkhole. The hydrogeological and mining studies will provide the answers we are looking for today,” Lundin said.

“Different events that could have caused the sinkhole are being investigated, including the abnormal rainfall recorded during the month of July, which is relevant,” added Lundin.

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World

Chile to seek ‘consequences’ for sinkhole near copper mine

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SANTIAGO, Aug 8 – Chile will seek to apply harsh sanctions to those responsible for a huge sinkhole near a copper mine in the country’s north, the mining minister said on Monday.

The mysterious hole of 36.5 meters in diameter that emerged in late July has provoked the mobilization of local authorities and led the mining regulator to suspend operations of a nearby mine owned by Canada’s Lundin (LUN.TO) in the northern district of Candelaria.

“We are going to go all the way with consequences, to sanction, not just fine,” Mining Minister Marcela Hernando said in a press release, adding that fines tend to be insignificant and the ruling must be “exemplary” to mining companies.

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Chilean authorities have not provided details of the investigation into causes of the sinkhole.

Local and foreign media showed various aerial images of the huge hole in a field near the Lundin Mining operation, about 665 kilometers north of the Chilean capital. Initially, the hole, near the town of Tierra Amarilla, measured about 25 meters (82 feet) across, with water visible at the bottom. read more

The Canadian firm owns 80% of the property, while the remaining 20% is in the hands of Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd (5713.T) and Sumitomo Corp (8053.T).

The minister added that although the country’s mining regulator had carried out an inspection in the area in July, it was not able to detect this “overexploitation.”

“That also makes us think that we have to reformulate what our inspection processes are,” she said.

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Reporting by Fabian Andres Cambero; Writing by Carolina Pulice;
Editing by Leslie Adler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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World

Chile sinkhole grows large enough to swallow France’s Arc de Triomphe

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Aug 7 (Reuters) – A sinkhole in Chile has doubled in size, growing large enough to engulf France’s Arc de Triomphe and prompting officials to order work to stop at a nearby copper mine.

The sinkhole, which emerged on July 30, now stretches 50 meters (160 feet) across and goes down 200 meters (656 feet). Seattle’s Space Needle would also comfortably fit in the black pit, as would six Christ the Redeemer statues from Brazil stacked head-to-head, giant arms outstretched.

The National Service of Geology and Mining said late on Saturday it is still investigating the gaping hole near the Alcaparrosa mine operated by Canadian company Lundin Mining (LUN.TO), about 665 km (413 miles) north of Santiago.

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In addition to ordering all work to stop, the geology and mining service said it was starting a “sanctioning process.” The agency did not provide details on what that action would involve.

Lundin did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The company last week said the hole did not affect workers or community members and that it was working to determine the cause. read more

Lundin owns 80% of the property and the rest is held by Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation.

Initially, the hole near the town of Tierra Amarilla measured about 25 meters (82 feet) across, with water visible at the bottom. read more

The geology and mining service said it has installed water extraction pumps at the mine and in the next few days would investigate the mine’s underground chambers for potential over-extraction.

Local officials have expressed worry that the Alcaparrosa mine could have flooded below ground, destabilizing the surrounding land. It would be “something completely out of the ordinary,” Tierra Amarilla Mayor Cristobal Zuniga told local media.

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Reporting by Marion Giraldo; Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Lisa Shumaker

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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World

Sinkhole opens under swimming pool in Israel, video shows, killing Klil Kimhi of Tel Aviv

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A man in central Israel was killed on Thursday after a sinkhole opened under a swimming pool during a house party for co-workers and sucked him down into a hole 43 feet deep.

Rescue teams responded to a villa in the town of Karmei Yosef, about 25 miles outside Tel Aviv, that was hosting a company event. Video of the incident shows a sinkhole opening up on Thursday afternoon, causing the pool to buckle and collapse inward as guests were in and around the pool. All of the water, inflatable rafts and toys were sucked into the large hole within seconds.

Two men were shown being dragged into the sinkhole as partygoers watched in horror and shock while dance music played poolside. While one of the men managed to climb out after falling down, the other is seen on video submerged underneath the water and attempting to escape the vortex. He then disappeared into the sinkhole.

After a four-hour search, first-responders were able to find the man at the bottom of the sinkhole — Klil Kimhi, 32, of Tel Aviv — who was pronounced dead, according to the Times of Israel. Authorities have not revealed Kimhi’s cause of death.

The couple who owns the property was arrested on suspicion of negligent manslaughter. Police say the couple, identified by Israeli media as Natan and Rachel Meller, did not apply for a permit before building the pool. At a Friday hearing, Sgt. Rami Desta accused the couple of playing “a very large contribution to this tragic outcome.”

“They could have prevented this outcome if they had gotten a permit,” said Desta, according to the Israeli news site Ynet.

The Mellers were released Friday morning on house arrest to their daughter’s house in Petah Tikva.

Zion Amir, the couple’s attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He defended his clients as “good people” during Friday’s hearing and outlined that they could not have anticipated a sinkhole to open under their swimming pool.

“This is a very unusual event,” he said, according to Ynet.

Sinkholes are areas of ground that lack natural external surface drainage, according to the United States Geological Survey. Spaces and caverns can develop underground as rock below the land surfaces, such as limestone, carbonate rock or salt beds, dissolve. One of the reasons sinkholes can be so dramatic is because a sudden collapse of the land surface can occur at any time, according to USGS.

In the United States, the most damage from sinkholes tends to occur in states such as Florida, Texas, Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, the USGS says. Just this week, video captured a New York City van falling into a sinkhole in the Bronx.

Sinkholes are also an issue in Israel. Ittai Gavrieli, a senior researcher with the Israel Geological Institute told, Agence France-Presse last year that there were thousands of sinkholes in and around Israel, including around the shores of the Dead Sea.

Roughly 50 people were at the house party Thursday, according to the Times of Israel. One guest told Keshet 12 that everything happened so fast, and that it wasn’t immediately clear what was unfolding before them.

“The water level suddenly started receding and a hole opened up, creating a vortex that swept two people inside,” she said.

Aviv Bublil, the lifeguard who worked at the pool party, recounted to Ynet how “the ground just dropped.”

“I saw two people … two people were missing,” Bublil said.

The 34-year-old man who climbed out of the sinkhole suffered minor injuries to his head and legs, Magen David Adom paramedic Uri Damari told the Jerusalem Post.

Photos shared by authorities show how the giant sinkhole ripped through the middle of the pool.

On social media, friends are flooding Kimhi’s Facebook page with remembrances.

“May his memory be a blessing,” the Israel Hayom newspaper wrote on its Facebook account.

On Friday, Amir, the attorney for the homeowners with the pool, emphasized at the hearing that the fatal sinkhole incident was “a terrible tragedy” that was “no less unusual than a lightning strike.”

“Such a thing happens once in a hundred years,” Amir said, according to Ynet. “And it unfortunately happened.”



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Science

Huge Sinkholes Are Forming on Arctic Seafloor

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(Newser)
–
Melting permafrost has been wreaking havoc on the Arctic landscape, triggering ground collapses that leave deep holes in the earth. Now we have evidence that the same thing is happening under the ocean. Large sections of permafrost, or permanently frozen ground, were submerged as glaciers melted around the end of the last ice age. Now, at least one large section of subsea permafrost, nearly 500 feet deep at the edge of the continental slope of Canada’s Beaufort Sea, is melting, triggering “extraordinarily rapid morphologic changes,” according to new research. The speed is surprising, particularly because the new features aren’t attributed to methane gas explosions or human-driven climate change more broadly.

Researchers who mapped a 10-square-mile area of the seafloor in 2010 and 2019 say they saw the emergence of 41 holes, at an average of 22 feet deep. One was so large—95 feet deep, 738 feet long, and 312 feet wide—that it could hold “a city block made up of six-story buildings,” CNN reports. Elsewhere, ice-filled hills—33 feet high and 164 feet wide on average—similar to pingos on land rose from the seafloor. “We know that big changes are happening across the Arctic landscape, but this is the first time we’ve been able to deploy technology to see that changes are happening offshore too,” Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute marine geologist Charlie Paull, co-author of a study published Monday in PNAS, says in a release.

Limited data for seafloor temperature don’t show a warming trend. Rather, “the evidence suggests that the submarine features we observed forming are essentially sinkholes and retreating scarps, collapsing into void space left behind by the thawing of ice-rich permafrost,” due to heat carried in slowly moving groundwater systems, Paull tells Newsweek. Such changes “derive from much older, slower climatic shifts related to Earth’s emergence from the last ice age, and appear to have been happening along the edge of the permafrost for thousands of years,” Paull adds. “Whether anthropogenic climate change will accelerate the process remains unknown.” Researchers plan to continue their survey this summer. (Read more Arctic Ocean stories.)

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Entertainment

‘La Brea’ Series Premiere Recap: Sci-Fi Sinkhole Drama on NBC

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NBC this Tuesday night invited you to a land down under — meaning, far beneath Los Angeles — with La Brea. Did the sinkhole drama suck you in?

La Brea stars Natalie Zea (Justified) as Eve Harris, an office manager and mom who was motoring past the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum with daughter Izzy (played by Zyra Gorecki) and son Josh (Jack Martin) when a massive sinkhole began forming at an intersection, first gulping down a startled traffic cop and then spreading to rip the Earth from beneath many buildings and cars. After first driving away backwards down a sidewalk (!), Eve and the kids got out and made a run for it, but when Josh got knocked down by the stampede, Eve doubled back . As such, the both of them fell into the sinkhole, despite Izzy’s best efforts to pull their mom to safety.

Coming to after safely landing… somewhere… Eve looked for Josh amid a sprawling expanse of trees, fields and hills. First, she bumped into a man we’d come to know as Ty (Chiké Okonkwo), who was holding a gun (for reasons revealed later). Their meeting was cut short when Eve saw smoke in the distance, and raced over to a clearing to find Josh and many others, plus vehicles, street signs, building parts, etc. There, as people tried to make any sense of what happened/where they were, we met stoner Scott (Rohan Mirchandaney)… teenage Riley (Veronica St. Clair) and her doctor/former SEAL dad Sam (Jon Seda)… and protein bar-hogging police officer Marybeth (Karina Logue).

Meanwhile, “topside”….

Josh and Izzy’s father, Gavin (The Night Shift‘s Eoin Macken), has called in a favor to get a pre-interview at the Air Force Base in El Segundo — wanting to be close to his kids, he explains, who recently moved to L.A. Thing is, Gavin’s 20-year career as a pilot unceremoniously ended when, following a crash in the desert, he began “seeing things.” Just as Gavin exits the meeting, the news breaks about the sinkhole, which Gavin heads out to after a panicked Izzy calls him. Apparently able to get within a reasonable distance of this L.A. traffic-jamming natural disaster (!) and after easily scooting past barricades and a cop (!!), Gavin finds and hugs Izzy — just as a flock of large, menacing birds flies out of the sinkhole. We and Gavin had seen this type of bird, before, in one of his headache-y “visions.”

Dr. Sophia Nathan from Homeland Security gives a presser nearby the sinkhole, saying that there is no hope of finding survivors of such a fall. (Afterwards, she scoffs to an associate that she was not about to reveal the “truth” about what has happened.)  Gavin, coming off a new “vision” in which he saw Eve and Josh in the same area as the primeval bird, insists to Dr. Nathan that there are survivors. When he later recites the tailfin number of the drone that DHS piloted into the aurora borealis (but eventually crashed inside the sinkhole), Nathan pretends not to be convinced, but privately nudges an Agent Markman to get the 411 on this man.

Later, determined to prove his theory, Gavin finds an old photo of him and Eve at the large rock from his vision, one with a handprint symbol on it. He then drives out to said rock and begins digging. And just as Izzy and her Aunt Jessica (Ione Skye) arrive to ask what the heck he is up to, Gavin unearths the wedding ring necklace that Eve always wears, but lost during her tumble into the sinkhole!

Back down below….

While rummaging for supplies, Riley and Scott discover Virgin Mary statues bricks of heroin inside one car’s trunk. Eve and Josh, meanwhile, have just busted Marybeth for hoarding protein bars when a growling dire wolf shows up. They bolt for camp, where a second wolf appears. As everyone races for cover, Scott zones out when Riley begs him to let her inside a car, so she instead scrambles underneath. One wolf tackles and nips at Josh, before Ty uses his gun to put down the beast. Sam tends to badly wounded Josh the best he can inside an inverted bus, but he needs antibiotics, needles and other supplies. Eve remembers seeing an ambulance fall into the sinkhole, so as it gets dark (don’t get me started on Hollow Earth “sunsets”) — and with help from suicidal Ty — they locate the vehicle a mile or so away. As they do, Eve regards the silhouette of the Hollywood Hills in the ambulance’s logo… and realizes it matches the hills in the distance. “I think we’re still in Los Angeles,” she surmises — just as a sabre tooth tiger confronts them!

What happens next?

As Eve indicated in the closing seconds, “We run,” Natalie Zea previews for TVLine. “We had already seen the wolves [that attacked the camp], but the sabre tooth is the first time that they encounter an animal that has long been extinct. That’s when the ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore’ moment really solidifies.”

Speaking of “Not Kansas,” how is that Eve, Josh, Sam et al apparently landed so gingerly on the ground, after tumbling into the deep, deep sinkhole?

Presented with that burning question, Zea shared, “The cast has a theory! But it may be a spoiler. But yes, we had asked about the criteria for survival, because not everybody who falls into the hole makes it…. We have some theories, but I don’t know that they’re accurate — and I think it may be up to the audience to decide.”

Want scoop on La Brea? Email InsideLine@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.

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Science

Michigan’s Lake Huron sinkhole is a window into how Earth’s earliest forms of life diversified

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Researchers studying a unique environment in Michigan’s Lake Huron used it to effectively look back at ancient Earth and how changing day length could have impacted the earliest forms of life that existed: tiny organisms called cyanobacteria.

Also called blue-green algae, cyanobacteria evolved more than 2.4 billion years ago, and they were churning out oxygen when Earth was still pretty inhospitable. Scientists have struggled to explain why it took so long for Earth’s oxygen levels to rise so gradually over almost 2 billion years — until now.

Cyanobacteria doesn’t have a great reputation these days because it’s associated with toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie and other bodies of water. But this bacteria has been around longer than any other life form on Earth, and it was the first to convert light into energy through photosynthesis — and release oxygen as a byproduct.

Researchers began to wonder how an increasing day length on early Earth might have allowed cyanobacteria to create more oxygen and lead to a diversity in animal life.

“When the Earth-Moon system formed, days were much shorter, possibly even as short as six hours,” said study coauthor Brian Arbic, a physical oceanographer at the University of Michigan, in a statement. “Could this mean that changing daylength would have impacted photosynthesis over Earth’s history?”

When the moon became the Earth’s satellite, the tug of the moon’s gravity slowed down the rotation rate of our planet, leading to longer days. More sunlit hours would then have a positive effect on photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria.

Answers in a sinkhole

Beneath Lake Huron is a bedrock formed from ancient seas that once covered the North American continent. This bedrock includes limestone, dolomite and gypsum, and over time, groundwater has dissolved some of it. This has formed cracks and caves, both of which have created submerged sinkholes.

The submerged Middle Island Sinkhole in Lake Huron is where cold groundwater rich in sulfur and poor in oxygen seeps out of the lake bottom. While most plant and animal life avoid this area, microbes have found a home in this extreme environment 80 feet (24.4 meters) below the water’s surface. The brightly colored bacteria form colonies called microbial mats, and they are the perfect analog for researchers wanting to study similar colonies that once existed on land and the seafloor billions of years ago.

Today, two types of cyanobacteria form competing colonies here. One is a purple cyanobacteria that produces oxygen, while the other is a white bacteria that generates energy with the help of sulfur.

The sulfur-fueled bacteria lie on top of the cyanobacteria from dusk until dawn, which blocks their access to sunlight. But once the sun emerges, the top bacteria colony moves down and allows the purple cyanobacteria to start the photosynthetic process to produce oxygen.

“However, it takes a few hours before they really get going, there is a long lag in the morning. The cyanobacteria are rather late risers than morning persons, it seems,” said study author Judith Klatt, a geomicrobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, in a statement.

“I realized that daylength and oxygen release from microbial mats are related by a very basic and fundamental concept: During short days, there is less time for gradients to develop and thus less oxygen can escape the mats,” Klatt said.

By modeling the link between sunlight and oxygen production, Klatt and her colleagues discovered that the release of oxygen during two 12-hour days on early Earth would not match that of a 24-hour day. The study team’s findings showed a direct link between day length and how much oxygen can be released by microbes.

“Simply speaking, there is just less time for the oxygen to leave the mat in shorter days,” Klatt said.

This suggests that two great jumps in oxygen on Earth, including the Great Oxidation Event more than 2 billion years ago and the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event between 800 and 540 million years ago, could both be connected to longer days on Earth.

The study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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Science

How Did This Skull End Up All Alone in a Cave in Italy? We Finally Have an Answer

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It was found in 2015 – an isolated clue to a macabre mystery set in motion thousands of years in the past.

This ancient puzzle consisted of just a single piece: a solitary human cranium, discovered all by itself with no other skeletal remains around, resting inside a cave in Bologna, Italy, at the center of a cavernous depression the locals call Dolina dell’Inferno (Hell’s sinkhole).

 

It was not an easy thing to find.

The well-concealed skull, missing its lower jawbone, could only be reached by traversing a difficult cave passage called the Meandro della cattiveria (Maze of Malice), and then ascending a vertical shaft to a height of 12 meters (39 ft), where the cranium rested on a rocky ledge.

Due to difficulty in accessing the spot, speleologists weren’t able to retrieve the cranium until 2017, at which point researchers had a chance to study this mysterious, ancient specimen.

The lonesome skull turned out to be ancient indeed, with radiocarbon dating suggesting the cranium belonged to an individual who lived sometime between 3630 and 3380 BCE, placing them within the archaeological context of the early Eneolithic (aka Chalcolithic) period of the region.

Other Eneolithic human remains have been found in the general area; not in Hell’s sinkhole, but in a rock shelter approximately 600 meters (nearly 2,000 ft) away from the cave in which the skull was found.

So, the greater context makes some sense. But how exactly did this solitary skull get so far away from its Eneolithic counterparts, positioned high up on a ledge, yet buried within a malicious maze of a cave, and concealed at a depth of 26 metres (85 ft) below the ground?

 

According to anthropologist Maria Giovanna Belcastro from the University of Bologna – the first author of a new analysis of the skull’s unusual fate – a number of factors were at play.

Belcastro’s team investigated the cranium, which the team says most likely came from a young woman, aged between 24 and 35.

Evidence of various lesions on the sides of the skull are likely the result of human manipulations of the skull at the time of the woman’s death, the researchers suggest, perhaps reflecting ritualistic acts to remove flesh from the cranium, as part of a funeral custom.

Other lesions on the cranium, some believed to have been sustained antemortem (prior to death), may have been due to an injury that killed the woman, and other markings could be evidence of a kind of medical treatment delivered by her people.

As for how the skull became so separated from the rest of its skeleton, the researchers hypothesize that the cranium may have intentionally or accidentally been removed from the rest of the body, before rolling or being pushed along the ground by water or mud flows, until it somehow came to the edge of Hell’s sinkhole, ultimately falling within the depression.

 

Over time, water infiltration in the sinkhole could have dissolved gypsum deposits within the cave, creating the vertical shaft beside the skull’s secure resting place.

“The reactivated cave passage started evolving downward, with the formation of a lateral sinking creek and carving out the maze lying below,” the researchers write in their paper.

“This new reactivation was able to entrench approximately 12 meters of gypsum, connecting to the lowering base level.”

Various sediments lodged within the cranial cavity offer some support for this argument, suggesting matter got stuck inside the skull during water or debris flow, as the skull made its improbable, chaotic journey into the cave. Signs of other trauma to the cranium suggest plenty of bumps along the ride.

This hypothetical interpretation isn’t what necessarily happened, of course, which is something we can never truly know for sure. But as the researchers point out, of all the parts of a human skeleton, the shape of a skull makes it the most suited to doing a runaway.

“If the skeleton was intact by the time of this sequence of events, other skeletal elements, different in shape and size, might have remained stuck elsewhere and dispersed during transportation,” the authors suggest.

“The cranium would have rolled more easily than other skeletal parts in a water stream and debris flow… During its decomposition and those dynamic phases, it would have been filled with sediment. Therefore, it would have reached the cave and come to a stop on the plateau where it was found.”

The findings are reported in PLOS One.

 

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