We lost a natural wonder to gravity and erosion on Thursday, August 8, 2024.¹ Those who visited Double Arch, also called “Hole in the Roof Arch,” in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah, can count themselves privileged. Their future descendants won’t get to see it. This news got folks asking about other, even more iconic natural arches like those at Arches National Park, also in Utah. Will each arch inevitably fall until none are left, or are they being replaced by new arches?

The answer seems to be that they aren’t being formed today! News from around the world report arches’ collapse but never their formation. For example, BBC News reported the collapse of Darwin’s Arch near the Galápagos Islands on May 17, 2021.² Elephant Rock in New Brunswick broke almost in half in 2016,³ and the arch that once made up the “trunk” of Elephant Rock in New Zealand broke off that same year.⁴

Arches seems to go in one direction. But that’s just what park signage and officials seem unwilling to admit.

Karen Garthwait is spokesperson for Arches and Canyonlands National Park. Perhaps she recalls the partial collapse of Landscape Arch at Arches National Park on September 1, 1991.⁵ In response to fears that more arches may fall soon, she told Associated Press, “Our mission is to preserve the natural processes that create these structures, which of course, is the same process that will eventually undo them as well.”⁶

If the same processes that fell arches form them, then where are the news reports of all the new ones?

Instead, some process that does not generally occur today must have happened all over the place in the past to make our continuously collapsing arches. Researchers publishing in Nature Geoscience found a straightforward process to make arches, but it comes with a catch.⁷

Their experiments showed, and anyone can watch the resulting online video, arches forming in mere hours just by having sand piles mostly underwater.⁸ Their results showed that arches do form fast when the water is high enough. Nobody has yet shown how arches could form slowly.

If one were to apply this high water model to the formation of the world’s arches, then water would have to have almost covered the globe at some similar time in the relatively recent past—recent enough for all the world’s arches to not be collapsed yet.

Falling arches like Hole in the Roof signal a recent, watery past on our planet.

References

1. Popular Geologic Feature Collapses in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. NPS news release. Posted on nps.gov August 9, 2024, accessed August 27, 2024.
2. Galapagos Islands: Erosion Fells Darwin’s Arch. BBC News. Posted on bbc.com May 17, 2021, accessed August 27, 2024.
3. Elephant Rock at Hopewell Rocks Near Bay of Fundy Collapses. CBC News. Posted on dbc.ca accessed August 27, 2024.
4. Weber, A. ‘Elephant Rock’ in Taranaki Truncated. RNZ News. Posted on rnz.co.nz December 5, 2016, accessed August.
5. The 1991 Landscape Arch Rock Fall. National Park Service. Posted on nps.gov, accessed August 27, 2024.
6. Schoenbaum, H. The Collapse of an Iconic Arch in Utah Has Some Wondering If Other Famous Arches Are Also at Risk. AP News. Posted on apnews.com August 2024, updated August 16, 2024, accessed August 27, 2024.
7. Bruthans, J. et al. 2014. Sandstone Landforms Shaped by Negative Feedback between Stress and Erosion. Nature Geoscience. 7 (8): 597–601.
8. See video under “Electronic supplementary material.” Lovett, R. A. 2014. Sandstone Arches Form under Their Own Stress. Nature. Posted on nature.com July 20, 2014, accessed August 27, 2024.

Stage image: Double arch before collapse
Stage image credit: Copyright © Ulliessen. Used in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holder.

* Dr. Brian Thomas is a research scientist at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in paleobiochemistry from the University of Liverpool.