#AGU13 - Deep in the swamplands of southern Louisiana, a sinkhole gobbled up an entire 25 acres over the span of about one year and caused the evacuation of a nearby town. While disasters like this might come as a shock to the alligators in the marsh, events like this are becoming possible to forecast, according to Cathleen Jones of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Jones uses data from radar instruments on NASA aircraft, flown repeatedly over a site, to detect change in land surfaces. She was surprised to find that the technique can even detect some sinkholes before they collapse, and described the specifics of her findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. The annual fall meeting of the AGU is a chance for more than 22,000 scientists, educators, and students to present their research, broaden their knowledge base and embrace the excitement of science. In these 15-second videos, scientists talk about the NASA s...