5.52pm GMT

It’s a pretty uncontroversial yes this week. Humans do contribute to sinkholes and probably have ever since the invention of irrigation. Anything that has the potential to divert water into weak points beneath the earth will accelerate the creation of the pits into which houses, cars and unfortunately people sometimes fall. The drying out of the ground by abstraction or the soaking from a burst pipe are the most direct examples of human-caused sinkholes.

But it is important to remember that the timescale for many of these events is thousands of years, meaning the majority of sinkholes started undermining the earth long before humans had anything to do with it. These are primarily natural phenomena, which humans can occasionally influence.

The connection to climate change is strong. Greater variability in rainfall will almost certainly create a more volatile earth. But more sinkholes are pretty low on the list of things we should be concerned about because of climate change.

Today’s question is a bit of a ruse. By asking whether these events can be attributed to humans, we really want to know if there is anything we can do to stop them. It is mostly impossible, or at least too expensive, to check whether the house you are buying or building is on top of a giant alka-seltzer. But even in this month of madness, sinkholes are tremendously infrequent events. Their occurrence is likely to increase and there are things we can do to mitigate the risk of them happening, but the interest in them, driven by the media (myself included) harps on the primal fear I mentioned in my intro. The sickened fascination induced by sinkholes makes them seem like a present danger, which they really are not. I’m reminded of George Monbiot’s piece on sharks this week in which he said the extreme domesticity of our lives makes us “believe that any remaining hazards presented by the natural world are far more dangerous than they really are”.

Thanks for the debate today and all the great comments. Watch your step!