Before 1980, Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur was a 3 metre deep freshwater lake, but due to a highly unusual man-made disaster, today it is a 60 m deep saltwater lake. On the morning of November 20th, 1980, a group of Texaco Fuel Company workers drilling the lake for oil inadvertently broke through the lake bed into the upper reaches of the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine below. The water began to pour rapidly into the cavern left by the mining process, and soon the expanding sinkhole had swallowed the entire lake, the drilling platform, and 11 barges1! Barges being pulled into the sinkhole The [...]

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