How Many Breakfast Burritos Could Fit in the Giant Chilean Sinkhole?
Trying to wrap your head around the depth of the rapidly expanding pit in South America? We’ve broken it down in terms our readers understand—like fly rods, climbing ropes, and breakfast burritos.
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There’s a sinkhole in Chile that’s growing fast—it doubled in size over the past week—and has caused the shutdown of a nearby copper mine. According to the most recent estimate, the potential hellmouth was 164 feet wide and 656 feet deep, and people on the internet have been trying to quantify that the way they do best: by telling us all the things we could stack inside it. Notable comparisons include four of Paris’s Arc de Triomphes and one Seattle Space Needle.
https://twitter.com/Rik_H_/status/1556762005368934400
If your mind is still boggled, here are some metrics that, as an Outside reader, you might be better equipped to understand.
- 1.7 Hyperions, the world’s tallest tree, stacked on top of each other (excluding root systems), or 2.4 General Shermans, the world’s largest tree by volume
- 106 Springbar Outfitter canvas tents
- Five full rappels on even the longest climbing rope (at 80 meters)
- 91 of Denver Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson’s supersized trucks, if we assume, based on some eyeballing and sticky-note math, that the truck is seven feet two inches tall (or 2.19 meters); or 30.2 of those vehicles stacked end to end
- 73 nine-foot fly rods
- Two-thirds of that indoor ski slope Kim Kardashian visited recently, if you stood it on end; or 127 Kim Kardashians (she’s five foot two)
- One thousand eight-by-three-inch breakfast burritos, stacked longways
- The entire K2 summit conga line … and then some
A few natural wonders, however, really put the pit in perspective. It could fit just 20 percent of El Capitan’s Freerider, the route free-soloed by Alex Honnold, or 0.00005 percent of the length of the Pacific Crest Trail. Undoubtedly, it won’t be long before the sinkhole attracts its own posse of outdoor hopeful record setters going for the FKD (fastest known descent).