Friday's Mining Journal reported that the northeast turret of the Miners Castle rock formation in the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore collapsed due to erosion and fell into Lake Superior on Thursday. (Click for a photo taken just one day after on Michigan in Pictures!)

The formations of Pictured Rocks are constantly changing due to the action of wind, water and ice. In 1900, the Grand Portal Arch collapsed in 1900 and The Munising News wrote:

The Grand Portal was one of the grandest, most sublime and interesting sights of the Pictured Rocks. The cavity was large enough for a good-sized steamer to enter into and it was perhaps a hundred feet or more in height from the surface of the water.

The LSJ article has a large before and after photo that you should definitely check out.

Today's Mining Journal asks Why did Miners Castle rock fall?. They talk with Dewitt geologist David Baxter who has been photographing geologic formations for his 2007 book Roadside Geology of Michigan. Baxter says his photos from May 2003 show an area of cracking in the right turret.

Park officials said (click photo for news release) that while the rockfall at Miners Castle on April 13th was startling, such events are not rare along the Pictured Rocks escarpment with at least five major falls over the past dozen years.

All of those major collapses involved the same rock unit, the Miners Castle Member of the Munising Formation, which is generally described as a crumbly layer of former lake sand deposits, overlaying Jacobsville sandstone, a reddish rock which was used in building many city buildings during the late 1800s.Read Superior Claims Landmark! in the Mining Journal
Read One turret of Pictured Rock's Miners Castle collapses in the LSJ
Check out Rock Collapses at Grand Portal Point for more from the 1900 article, including photos!

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