"While driving my tractor through the field, I keep thinking anywhere could sink and I know there's death at the bottom," Fatih Sik, a 45-year-old farmer, tells AFP in Karapinar in the central region of Anatolia. His land is in Konya, a vast agricultural province known as Turkey's breadbasket, where sinkholes have existed for centuries. But their numbers have risen in recent years due to increasing drought and a subsequent overuse of groundwater for irrigation, experts say. Some have appeared in the large fields of corn, beetroot, wheat and clover that dot the Konya plain. Although invisible from a distance, from the edge they can be dizzyingly deep, some plunging down 50 metres (165 feet) into the ground. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES