The famed Darwin's Arch in the Galapagos Islands has lost its top, and officials are blaming natural erosion of the stone.
Ecuador's Environment Ministry reported the collapse on its Facebook page on Monday.
The rock structure — 43 meters (141 feet) high, 70 meters (230 feet) long and 23 meters (75feet) wide — is less than 1 kilometer (about half a mile) from Darwin Island and it's a popular spot for scuba divers. It's not accessible by land.
“Obviously all the people from the Galapagos felt nostalgic because it’s something we’re familiar with since childhood, and to know that it has changed was a bit of a shock," said Washington Tapia, director of conservation at Galapagos Conservancy. "However, from a scientific point of view, it’s part of the natural process. The fall is surely due to exogenous processes such as weathering and erosion which are things that normally happen on our planet.”
The unique flora and fauna on remote islands, some 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off the coast of mainland Ecuador are famed in part for inspiring Charles Darwin's thoughts on evolution.
Blame geography for the U.S. getting hit by stronger, costlier, more varied and frequent extreme weather than anywhere on the planet, several experts said. But that's only part of it.
Residents across a wide swath of the U.S. raced Sunday to assess the destruction from fierce storms that spawned possibly dozens of tornadoes from the South and the Midwest into the Northeast.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved selling overdose antidote naloxone over-the-counter, marking the first time a opioid treatment drug will be available without a prescription.
Millions of Americans could lose access to Medicaid on April 1, and Joe Dunn, senior vice president of public policy at the National Association of Community Health Centers, joined Cheddar News' anchor Shannon LaNier to discuss what this means for public health.
One third of Americans don't have access to primary care providers in their communities, according to a study from the National Association of Community Health Centers published last month.
Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain implant venture, is reaching out to major U.S. neurosurgery centers to potentially begin testing its devices on humans, according to a Reuters report.
