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.
Read more at The Washington Post
