When I returned home from vacation a few days early than expected, I was looking forward to peace and quiet. Instead, I was met with a breathtaking sight: a massive hole in the center of my backyard. Deep and uneven, as if dug quickly by underworld animals. My initial reaction was, did someone try to bury or unearth something? I was grabbing for my phone to call the cops.
But then I spotted something weird at the bottom: loose earth crisscrossed by tunnels and claw marks. The longer I looked, the more obvious it became: this was not man-made. When I called a pest control professional, he instantly diagnosed the problem: moles. Apparently, while I was enjoying the beach, a large-scale building project was taking on beneath my yard.
An army of moles had been excavating tunnels to find food, and then things got interesting. Because of their intense activity, the ground had become unstable. The earth strata began to fall, a phenomenon known as ground subsidence or, scientifically, suffosion. Simply put, the planet lacks internal support and descends downward like a funnel. And that is precisely what happened in my case: the moles did their job, and the unstable soil simply fell way. Now, instead of a nice grass, I have a swimming pool-sized crater. If not for the initial shock, I could have used this as an opportunity to build a pond or learn about geology.