My niece Jessica put up a post challenging her friends to flood FB with beach pictures. So I thought I’d bring on a little arch madness with a post on the sea arches of Mendocino County.
Sea arches are one of the most ephemeral of landforms, rarely lasting more than a century, often standing for only a few decades before the constant battering of the relentless surf sends them crashing down.
For instance, Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz had 3 bridges in 1904. Today only one remains. If you’d like to see how dramatic these changes can be in such an incredibly short time, check out this article that Gary Griggs wrote for the Santa Aguila Foundation. The before and after pictures are astounding!
These geologic sculptures can be much more fragile than they look. Even thick, seemingly stable arches are subject to catastrophic collapse. In March 2015 an arch collapsed at Point Reyes National Seashore, killing a woman. If you’re walking the headlands of northern California and see signs warning you to stay back from the edges of the cliffs, heed them. Erosion is on a fast track here.
Geohazards like these catastrophic collapses will become more and more common in future years, due to sea level rise caused by climate change.
Your children may not see the same arches you did when they visit the Pacific Coast. But the forces that destroy these landforms are constantly carving new ones, exquisite jewels in a dynamic landscape ruled by the sea.
