Extract from ABC News
The gaping pit next to Mustafa Acar's shed measured approximately 7 metres across and seemed to appear out of nowhere one afternoon.
Only hours earlier, he had been sitting in that exact spot, cooling off in the shade after a hard day's work on his farm, tending to his flock.
Peering down over the edge into the darkness, he noticed the pit had a distinct cylindrical shape, as if it were cut with an enormous machine.
"I was in a daze for a month after that," Mr Acar said.
The farmer, from Turkey's Konya province, now avoids walking on his property at night for fear he might trip and fall to his death.
Across the plateau, farmers and townsfolk have reported similar occurrences: strange holes appearing without notice and seemingly at random.
All told, scientists have counted approximately 2,500 sinkholes around the Konya basin, a sprawling plain in the country's agricultural heartland.
About 700 of those are deep pits, mostly concentrated around the town of Karapnar, according to Fetullah Arık, who leads sinkhole research at Konya Technical University.
He says the number of sinkholes in the area has sharply risen in the past decade.
Every day, Professor Arık and his team of researchers scour the countryside to log and measure new sinkholes.
Some extend dozens of metres below the surface. Others are shallow recesses.
Some appear in paddocks, some in corn fields, and others near village streets. Many are too deep for sunlight to reach the bottom.
All of them bear the same telltale cylindrical shape leading downward to murky depths.
"The sinkholes are geologically beautiful, but human lives are at stake," Professor Arık said.
Records of human casualties caused by the sinkholes are hard to find, but the sudden appearance of so many in the last decade has alarmed nearby villagers.
"We have reason to be worried," said Erdoğan Çuhadar, a lifelong sheep farmer from Obruk köyü, which translates literally as "Sinkhole Village".
"If a sinkhole is too big and there are houses around, it will bury everything together."
Mr Acar, the farmer who discovered a sinkhole beside his shed, has had trouble wrapping his head around the sudden, silent phenomenon.
For those who have made their living from cultivating the land, the sinkholes have shaken what was once certainty of the very ground underfoot.
What's more, one destroyed part of the shed Mr Acar used to house livestock. He has since begun erecting a timber frame for a replacement shed on the other side of his farmhouse.
The sinkhole has even driven his children away — no longer interested in work on the farm since the pit appeared, they moved elsewhere in pursuit of other careers.
Meanwhile, Mr Acar has accepted there is little he can do to prepare in the event that another sinkhole suddenly appears.
"I can't do anything," he shrugged one hot afternoon in the fields behind his house.
"We will do the same as we always have."
Climate change and farming are contributing to the sinkhole problem
The underlying factor for so many new sinkholes in the last decade has been drought, which has become more intense with climate change. Yearly rainfall has waned, leaving crops parched.
To cope, many farmers have turned to wells that pump water from natural underground reservoirs to irrigate their farmland, which in turn weakens the earth and can lead to sudden collapse.
Beyond the roughly 35,000 licensed wells in the region, there are about three times as many illegally dug — it's hard to know the exact number.
On top of that, cattle farming has increased and water-intensive crops like corn are now grown far more, making agriculture in the region increasingly unsustainable, Professor Arık said.
"Fifteen to 20 years ago, corn was not grown around here. But now it's corn everywhere," he said.
Less rainfall and a higher dependence on dwindling groundwater have significantly drained underground water reserves in the Konya basin over the last six decades, in some places to near total depletion.
After 2015, the water table dropped about 2 metres. Six years later, that figure was 20 metres. Today, scientists estimate underground water levels have plummeted 50 metres since the middle of the 20th century.
Sheep farmer Mr Çuhadar has seen the draining of the Konya basin with his own eyes.
It hasn't rained nearly as much as he recalls it did one or two decades ago. And wells on neighbouring properties are getting deeper.
"Pumps installed at a depth of 60 metres have now been dropped to 120 metres. In the last 30 years, 60 metres of water has been lost," he said.
One measure of the extent of the water shortage is visible at Meyil Obruk, an enormous crater lake of groundwater that has for decades acted as a kind of water gauge for the surrounding area.
Ebuzer Şuhadar, a nearby village chief, remembers the water level being much higher during his childhood, when he would come to lay on the rocks with his friends in between splashing and swimming.
"The water draws people in. Our mothers used to come here to wash wool," he said.
Over the intervening four decades, the depth of the lake has plunged to a fraction of what it once was.
As he makes his way to the edge of the lake, Mr Şuhadar cranes his neck to see the layered colours of the lake's surface below.
He imagines how he spent hot evenings by the water's edge more than 40 years earlier.
It looks nothing like what he remembers.
Like everyone else in this region, Mr Şuhadar cannot fathom what life will look like when the lake runs dry.
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