Photos: Sinkholes spread fear in Turkey's parched breadbasket

Karapinar: Every time Turkish farmer Fatih Sik 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, a vast agricultural province known as Turkey's breadbasket.

This part of central Anatolia has had sinkholes for centuries. But their numbers have risen in recent years as increasing droughts have led to the overuse of wells for irrigation, experts say.

Many are dizzyingly deep - plunging up to 50 metres (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.

The government's AFAD disaster agency has identified more than 2,700 surface deformations and non-seismic fractures, which indicate a sinkhole risk and need investigation.

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 actions of people.

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

Over the winter, rainfall was 40 per cent below average in Konya, putting even more pressure on farmers in a region that produces 36 per cent of Turkey's wheat and 35 per cent of its beetroot.

Some have tried to solve their water problems by drilling illegal wells, weakening the bedrock.

At Lake Meke, a volcanic crater lake in Karapinar, the water has disappeared over the past decade, its dried-up lakebed covered with salt. But experts say even a badly needed rain could be harmful, putting extra pressure on the bedrock and accelerating its collapse.

Some entrepreneurs have turned the sinkhole crisis into an opportunity. Last week, Cem Kinay opened a luxury 13-room hotel inside an 800-year-old Seljuk caravanserai — an ancient roadside inn — on the brink of Turkey's oldest and most famous sinkhole.

This aerial photograph shows a view of Meyil sinkhole, with its pink lake, in Karapinar in the central Anatolian province of Konya, on June 24, 2024.