A giant crack the length of 6 football fields has opened up in Wyoming
A massive crack that appeared on a ranch in the southern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains is generating a lot of buzz on social media.
The crack - nicknamed "the gash" - is about 50 yards wide and 750 yards long, or about the length of six football fields, according to SNS Outfitters & Guides, who first spotted it in early October and posted in on their website.
Take a look:
This is how SNS described it:
"Here's what we know so far: we have two outfitted camps on this ranch. We hunt here every year and have been doing so for decades. Our guides first noticed the giant fissure in early October. We couldn't tell what had caused so much earth to suddenly move, but it certainly had not been there long."
But there's no cause for alarm. Experts say the crack formed via normal geological processes.
According to SNS, an engineer came to take a look, and found that water from a nearby spring was lubricating the cap rock. A spring running east-to-west may have made the ground slide north by about 15 to 20 million yards, he said.
SNS says the USGS assured them no seismic activity had been detected in the area, so the crack wasn't caused by an earthquake.
An unusually wet spring could have also saturated the ground and made it easier for the rock to slide, and gravity did the rest, Wyoming state geologist Tom Drean told Colorado's 9NEWS. These kinds of slides happen regularly in Wyoming, although they're typically smaller and happen in the spring, he added.