A massive gash across the southern foothills of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains has taken social media by storm.
This came after Richard Fink, a guide with Wyoming hunting company SNS Outfitters and Guides, first noticed a large fissure in a Wyoming ranch in early October, Candace Crew, a marketing specialist at Peak Outfitter Marketing told Tech Insider via Facebook messenger.
After an engineer, whose name and affiliation has not been released, took a closer look a few weeks later, he estimated that the newly-formed canyon measured a staggering 750 yards long by 50 yards wide. The company posted photos of the crack to its Facebook account the weekend of Oct. 24.
"We don't really know what caused it, or if it's done falling," Sy Gilliland, founder and owner of SNS Outfitter & Guides told Colorado's 9 News. "One of my hunters stumbled on it when he was hunting there Oct. 1."
The gash has sparked a flurry of speculation about what may be going on, including fears that this is the sign of the Apocalypse. But according to the engineer, this could just be normal geology at work.
The engineer who first sized up the fissure agrees, noting that multiple springs may have lubricated the sand and rock, causing a massive slide to the north.
But while water likely set off this landslide, Dave Petley, an environmental geologist wrote in a blog post for the American Geophysical Union, it more likely changed the "effective stress" on the formation, rather than by providing lubrication.
The US Geological Survey says that there haven't been any earthquakes in the region, so this wasn't likely the earth cracking over a fault line.
"It truly is incredible to look at, a canyon that formed almost overnight," SNS Outfitter and Guides said in the post, "a mountainside that seems to have suddenly collapsed."
