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The Google Maps red pin for the Hōlei Sea Arch, a rugged, 90-foot arch formed by 550-year-old lava flows in the elongated sculpture of the salty Pacific, now says, “Permanently closed.”
On Thursday, the National Park Service said the picturesque arch at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island collapsed sometime between Sept. 23 and Sunday, around the time a tropical cyclone sent significant swell up the coast.
“The exact time of the collapse is unknown and may have occurred when the park was temporarily closed during Tropical Storm Nolo,” the park service said in a statement.
The park service lamented the collapse of the natural feature, which it said was likely rooted in lava flows about half a millennium ago and then slowly formed by the subsidence of a roiling sea.
It also said some who wanted to see what was left of the Hōlei Sea Arch stepped too close to the edge of the surrounding cliffs – as seen on social media.
The park service warned sightseers to keep a safe distance from the eroding shoreline, where they “put themselves and first responders at great risk of falling off the rough, wave-swept shoreline and drowning,” it said.
“Visitors are urged to stay back from the precarious coastal cliff edges, which drop vertically into the ocean and present a serious fall hazard,” it said.
The collapse was a long time coming, the park service said, with the 2018 Kilauea eruption shaking the ground enough to damage the arch’s neighboring cliffs.
New cracks on the feature and its surroundings in early 2020 inspired Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park officials to move the Hōlei Sea Arch’s viewing area farther from Land’s End, the park service said.
“Later that year, massive surf from Tropical Storm Darby broke off a piece of rock from the bottom of the arch,” it said.
The US Geological Survey said the arch is a product of “differential erosion by ocean waves”, whereby the sea first works to remove material along cracks and weaker sections of basalt rock.
“Every day the ocean slaps against the pillar of the arch, eroding it a little more,” it said in its entry for the arch. “One day it will be gone.”
