For more than half a millennium, one of Hawaii’s most cherished geological marvels, an arch 90 feet high composed of lava rock, withstood a battering from the Pacific and evoked a sense of awe.
But that formation, the Holei Sea Arch at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, is now gone from the coastline on the Big Island, having crumbled into the ocean around the same time as a tropical storm brought strong winds and heavy rain to Hawaii in late September, the National Park Service said on Thursday.
A cascade of tributes and vacation photos quickly began pouring in from those who have hiked the park’s rugged coastline over the years, many of them lamenting the landmark’s demise.
The Park Service posted before-and-after photos of the coastline on social media on Thursday night, along with a crying face emoji.
“Yes, it’s true,” it wrote. “RIP Holei Sea Arch.”
Google Maps labeled the tourist attraction as “permanently closed.”
The arch was still standing as of Sept. 23 but had collapsed by the night of Sept. 27, according to park officials, who urged people to stay away from unstable cliff edges.
“The exact time of the collapse is unknown and could have occurred when the park was temporarily closed during Tropical Storm Nolo,” the Park Service wrote.
The storm, propelled by El Niño-warmed waters in the Pacific, passed about 145 miles south of the Big Island on Sept. 26, and brought heavy rain and powerful wind gusts.
It shifted between a tropical storm and a hurricane, part of a procession of storms that have inundated Hawaii since August.
Before that climatological cycle, park officials foreshadowed the disappearance of the sea arch, which they said in an online description was named for Holei, a small endemic plant in the milkweed family.
“This formation is beautiful, but temporary, and has a limited life span,” the description said. “The sea arch will eventually crumble into the sea. However, others will replace it as the cliff slowly migrates inland.”
According to the Park Service, the sea arch “was cut into the cliff of an ancient lava flow from about 550 years ago.”
The arch’s destruction recalled the collapse in February of another famed rock formation in Italy that was known as the Lover’s Arch. The landmark, a popular backdrop for wedding proposals on the Adriatic coast in Puglia, crumbled on Valentine’s Day after a storm.
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