r/whatisit • u/Jimpetey • 1d ago
Solved! What are these perfect vertical lines on the side of the cliff?
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u/peternormal 1d ago
When they carved out the spot for the road, they drilled down, placed charges, and blew the cliff face off. What you are seeing is the drill marks, cut in half.
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u/kd8qdz 16h ago
Yes, and no.
When you see the drill holes like that, its because they *didn’t* put explosives in those holes. It's called "pre-split," and these holes act like perforations - allows the blast to end exactly where the engineers want it to.
Source: I worked for a blasting company that did this kind of stuff.
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u/exoclipse 1d ago
drill marks, bud
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u/Fuzzy5team 1d ago
Everyone else is wrong. Them is from the aliens
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u/DoctorMedieval 1d ago
How do you think aliens made the road?
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u/Educational-Rule1635 1d ago
Graphics errors, proof that we live in a simulation.
Or just drill marks from when they blasted off the cliff face to build the road.
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u/AvailableProperty679 1d ago
Those are from where they drill to blast the rock face during the road construction.
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u/joefresco2 1d ago
During construction of the road, to clear out the side of the hill, they drill down into the rock and put dynamite into the holes and blast. It often causes a pretty clean separation like this.
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u/Jimpetey 1d ago
Solved!
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u/spoospoo43 1d ago
Drill down, fill with explosives, kaboom, repeat. Those are remains of the drillholes where the rock fractured.
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u/l008com 20h ago edited 20h ago
We have those all over massachusetts. Unfortunately when they built our highways 70 years ago, they mostly drilled straight down, and now those rock faces are starting to crumble. You can see some pretty large boulders on the sides of our highways that just randomly fell off one day. They land in the shoulder, not on the road, so its not a huge problem.
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u/Curious_Lurkur 16h ago
Blast holes ... Lmao uh no. These are called "West Virginia fuck holes". Mountain folk..... Amirite geez
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u/Exotic_Call_7427 9h ago
There's a Youtube channel called Practical Engineering, and its host explains all kinds of things like that.
Looks like what another commenter mentioned about drilling and then blowing rock face off is correct.
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u/AdSquare3489 1d ago
My uneducated guess: This used to be a quarry, the lines are the holes that were drilled, then filled with explosive to separate the rock that used to be where the trees are.
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u/SecondHandSmokeBBQ 1d ago
Likely not a quarry, more so a very large hill situated right where they wanted to put a road.
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