The Kerguelen Arch is a former

natural arch A natural arch, natural bridge, or (less commonly) rock arch is a natural landform where an arch has formed with an opening underneath. Natural arches commonly form where inland cliffs, coastal cliffs, fins or stacks are subject to erosion f ...

on the island of Grande Terre in the

Kerguelen Islands The Kerguelen Islands ( or ; in French commonly ' but officially ', ), also known as the Desolation Islands (' in French), are a group of islands in the sub-Antarctic constituting one of the two exposed parts of the Kerguelen Plateau, a large ...

of the

French Southern and Antarctic Lands The French Southern and Antarctic Lands (french: Terres australes et antarctiques françaises, TAAF) is an Overseas Territory (french: Territoire d'outre-mer or ) of France. It consists of: # Adélie Land (), the French claim on the continent ...

, an archipelago in the southern

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by th ...

. Although the arch collapsed sometime between 1908 and 1913, the remaining pillars can be found on the

littoral zone The littoral zone or nearshore is the part of a sea, lake, or river that is close to the shore. In coastal ecology, the littoral zone includes the intertidal zone extending from the high water mark (which is rarely inundated), to coastal areas ...

of the cape between Baie de l'Oiseau and Baie de la Dauphine, north of the Loranchet Peninsula. It is one of the best-known structures of the area, and its twin pillars are depicted on numerous

postage stamp A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage (the cost involved in moving, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the fa ...

s of the TAAF. Arche_des_Kerguelen_redux

In literature

Jean-Paul Kauffmann Jean-Paul Kauffmann (8 August 1944, Saint-Pierre-la-Cour, Mayenne) is a French journalist and writer, a former student of the École supérieure de journalisme de Lille (40th class). Biography His great-grandfather Michel Kauffmann left Alsace ...

wrote a book about the search for the Kerguelen Arch and Port-Christmas after he returned from a three-year captivity during the

Lebanon hostage crisis The Lebanon hostage crisis was the kidnapping in Lebanon of 104 foreign hostages between 1982 and 1992, when the Lebanese Civil War was at its height. The hostages were mostly US, Americans and Western Europeans, but 21 national origins were repr ...

.''L'Arche des Kerguelen, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation'',

, éditions Flammarion, 1992, . The sixth volume of the comic ''Prométhée'', by Christophe Bec and Stefano Raffaele, published in June 2012, depicts a Kerguelen Arch mysteriously found still standing in 2019, over a century after its collapse.

References

{{coord, -48.6913, 69.0717, type:landmark_region:FR-TF, display=title Natural arches of France Kerguelen Islands Collapsed arches