Gravity sucks
Probably the next famous arch to go.
I know of at least one spot near here where the sea has broken through a rock formation to create a tunnel or hole. I guess they may eventually be more arch like as the hole gets bigger.
In hindsight, removing 3/4 of the support for a massively heavy giant tree was bound to lead to problems.
The Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina has an ice dam that collapses on a one to ten year basis. It is quite spectacular when it goes.
Lizards mouth in Santa Barbara collapsed years ago. A small part of his mouth which totally changes the appearance.
That’s what I was thinking. New arches should be forming as fast as the old ones are collapsing, but it’s obviously not as dramatic when a small hole gets eroded through a rock wall. Do places with these kinds of natural monuments (like Arches National Park) point out the locations that are in the process of forming new arches?
I took this photo of an embryonic arch a few weeks ago in Fish Canyon, Utah.
I think the concavity was originally eroded out by flooding down the bed of the canyon when the bed of the canyon was much higher, at the level of the arch.
A crack has developed into a clear gap behind, so even without any differential hardness of rock you can see that water will flow down behind and probably continue to erode away the rock at the back while the arched part remains.
A big one that I just thought of – the Paradise Ice Caves (and similar such ice caves)
the Paradise Ice Caves were caves formed by runoff from the Paradise Glacier on Mount Ranier in Washington State. The caves were complex and interconnected and ran for miles. They were particularly beautiful because light filtering in from the outside was colored a wonderful blue by scattering within the ice
When I visited in 1989 I had to hike for miles over the snow (even in the summer) from the Paradise Lodge. I gather that, at one time, the caves came almost down to the lodge. It only took a few years after i saw them until they no longer existed at all. The Paradise Glacier melted so much that they disappeared.
The Pink and White Terraces in New Zealand were thought to have been lost in an 1886 volcanic eruption, but recent searches may have found them intact beneath water and/or earth/lava. They were the most popular attraction in NZ in the mid-1800’s.