In early October, East Island was decimated by Hurricane Walaka — one of the most intense storms ever recorded in the Pacific Ocean — and effectively wiped off the map overnight.
East Island was the second-largest islet — roughly half a mile long and 400 feet wide — in the French Frigate Shoals, a remote atoll in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. Believed to have formed about 2,000 years ago, it hosted a U.S. Coast Guard radio station from 1944 to 1952.
Now, the area once occupied by the boomerang-shaped stretch of white sand covered in sparse vegetation is nothing but water. Two small slivers of sand are the only evidence that East Island even existed at all.