John Mace looks close to it. I’m sure it’s not a blow hole near the sea. Blow holes are usually just narrow holes through which sea water spouts out when the waves come in. It rarely forms a mature “funnel” where big trees can flourish. also, the camera is at a shallow angle. My guess is we’re looking at the side of a mountain. The entire face above the hole is slickensided (a fault line) or may be a line of slumping (look at the way the plants grow above the hole.) The hole itself may be just a hollow or soft spot along the fault plane that got scoured during intermittent rains. In fact, it looks like an intermittent waterfall bottom.
Can’t place it but you have pronounced dry and wet seasons, I’ll bet.
If I saw the picture without any context other than being in the North American continent my first instinct would be to place it in northwestern Oregon or Washington state, again somewhere in the Cascades. It is almost certainly the remnants of a volcanic cinder cone; there is virtually no other way a structure like that could form; sinkholes with a deep karst substructure sometimes have a similar appearance but there is no way a sinkhole could be that deep and not start collapsing. The white at the bottom does kind of look like sea foam but could also be salts eroding from within a lava tube; the image is just too blurry to tell. If the opening did lead out to the ocean it would have to be somewhere with coastal volcanism, and probably pretty active as this kind of structure can’t be more than a few tens of thousands of years old without eroding away; in that case, I’d guess someplace like Hawaii or Costa Rica.
Doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in Big Sur, which is a pretty well-combed-over place. Trees do look like Monterey Pine, but other pines might look like that.
Another (remote) possibility is that the whitish-looking stuff at the bottom is ice. I’ve been to several “ice caves” in volcanic regions in the western US, but none that looked like that.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that is seafoam, if fact I’ll wager that is a wave rolling in.
Why would you say that. Though I agree it is not the Little River Sinkhole, comparing the two side by side they are surprisingly similar. They could have both been made by the same forces.
The Little River Blowhole was formed through erosion of material through a small fractured opening in sedimentary rock to the ocean. The Blowhole (which, despite the name, is not actually a blowhole) is only about twenty feet deep if that. The structure in the picture is much deeper; although we can’t see the top just scaling from the trees in in the picture it is clearly at least a hundred or more feet deep, and the steepness of the sides and conical shape of the side we can see in the picture looks like a classical cinder cone.
The white material in the bottom of the image does look like sea foam, insofar as it looks like anything, but the geology is inconsistent with any structures on the California coast that I’m familiar with. In order for a tall cinder cone to be close enough to the coast to have a feeder tube it would have to indicate recent coastal volcanism that isn’t found on the California coast, and in fact all of the volcanism in California in the Quarternary period has been Mount Shasta and points east and south. I’d still like to hear why the o.p. is convinced this is in California, but if it is I don’t believe it is on the coast.
I’ve not been to the Little River blowhole, but the one just up the road at Russian Gulch is a much broader bowl, and in much lighter colored sandstone. I would assume the geology at Little River to be similar, and does not match the gray rock or steep slopes in the photo.
Is the OP ever going to come back and explain why it’s thought to be in California?
The OP’s image is 1280 px wide, which makes me suspect that the picture is a screen grab from a video of some sort. Would sure be nice to have a bit more background on where the image comes from, and why it’s assumed to be in California.
It’s from The Karate Kid Part III, which surprisingly someone figured out in this thread already. The movie takes place in California and has Los Angeles locations like the Ennis House.
The context would have helped. The white at the bottom would appear to be sea wash from a cave. I still think it is likely North Coast, up past Mendocino, not Big Sur, but I’m happy to be disproven if someone can locate the site.
