The Twelve Apostles are a line of limestone sea stacks standing off the cliffs of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia, left behind in the Southern Ocean as the coast behind them wore back, and there were never twelve: seven stand now, one fell in 2005, and the rest are falling. The cliffs are soft limestone laid down as sea floor and lifted, and the ocean has been cutting them back at about two centimetres a year, carving caves that become arches that collapse into stacks, so the towers are only a few thousand years old and the coast is caught mid-collapse, with new stacks forming as the old ones go. They were called the Sow and Piglets until the 1920s, when the biblical name was chosen for marketing, and it stuck. The boardwalks on the clifftop are where the crowds gather, and the hour is sunset: the stacks go orange, then silhouette against the water, in a change that takes minutes, and after dark little penguins come ashore on the beach below the platforms.
The rest of the coast is the same collapse in different stages. A short drive east, Gibson Steps drop down the cliff to an open beach where the stacks tower directly overhead and the swell arrives with nothing to break it; three minutes west, a staircase drops between two stacks into Loch Ard Gorge, a closed beach of pale sand named for a ship wrecked here in 1878 whose two survivors, both nineteen, were washed into this gorge. Beyond it lie arches, blowholes and a bay full of stacks called the Bay of Islands, and a helicopter from the pad beside the visitor centre gives the one view the boardwalks cannot, the towers scattered across turquoise water along a coastline eating itself. From June to September southern right whales pass along the coast, with cows and calves gathering at the nursery off Warrnambool to the west. The Twelve Apostles are a coast falling into the sea in slow motion, and the stacks are the pieces that have not gone yet.