The Kissing Elephants Archway, a famous sea arch on the island of Comino, Malta, collapsed into the Mediterranean Sea at about 7.30 local time on Saturday 27 June 2006. The archway collapsed after a tourist, described as a 32-year-old American man, jumped from it into the sea, although this is unlikely to have been the cause of the collapse. Tragically, a couple were passing under the archway on a jet ski at the time of the collapse, with one of them, described as a 26-year-old Chinese man being killed and the other, a 27-year-old Chinese woman, being severely injured.
Sea arches are dramatic features, and long-lived by Human standards, but are formed by coastal erosion and have a finite lifetime. Sea arches are formed when an exposed headland has a softer rock at its base than above (in this case a soft clay limestone beneath a harder coralline limestone), which causes the arch to be hollowed out as the underlying stone is washed away. Obviously this is an unstable situation, and eventually the arch becomes so undermined that it collapses into the sea.
Archway collapses are usually associated with storm events, which can batter already weakened structures and cause them to collapse. However, the Kissing Elephants Archway collapsed during a period of calm, but extremely hot, weather, during an unprecedented heatwave which has affected much of western Europe, and which has been associated with more than 1300 deaths so far. Though less obvious than storms or even frosts (which can crack rocks when water in crevices freezes and expands), extreme heat can also fracture rocks as the different minerals from which rock is made up expand and contract at different rates as they are heated and cooled. This is something which Humans have exploited since the palaeolithic, with rocks often being placed into fires to make them easier to crack.
See also...
.png)
.png)
