PHOTOS: Second El Capitan Rockfall At Yosemite National Park

A second rockfall was reported at Yosemite National Park’s El Captain on Thursday, a day after a slab that dropped from the rock formation killed a British climber and injured another.

According to the New York Times, the rockfall occurred at about 3:40 p.m. EDT, on the eastern edge near a popular trekking route called the Waterfall Route. One person was airlifted from the scene, and search and rescue operations were being conducted in the rubble for possible victims, the NBC Bay Area reported.

Pictures and videos captured Thursday’s incident, showing huge plumes of white dust surging through the valley floor below. Tourists were asked to use Southside Drive to exit Yosemite Valley after the Northside Drive was closed due to the rockfall.

Ken Yager, president and founder of the Yosemite Climbing Association, told The Guardian that Thursday’s rockfall appeared to be “substantially bigger” than the earlier one. Yager reported he saw the cloud of dust and emergency services being called to the scene.

A climber, Ryan Sheridan, told The Guardian he had reached the top of El Capitan when the rock formation slid down below him. “There was so much smoke and debris,” he said. “It filled the entire valley with smoke.”

Another climber, Peter Zabrok, in a video that captured visuals after Thursday's rockfall, said it was "a full order of magnitude bigger" than the previous one. "We felt the entire mass of El Capitan shaking under our feet," Zabrok said in an interview with NBC Bay Area. "We wondered if the full face of the rock we were standing on was going to collapse," he said.

Scott Gediman, a park spokesman stated that a geologist was being called in to inspect the site and an air ambulance was being flown in, NYT reported. An image posted by Sheridan on Instagram showed the plume of dust clouding the valley below.

Other pictures of the rockfall also appeared on social media.

After a series of at least eight rockfalls killed one man and two other people over two days, the national park re-routed roads around the base of El Captain. The Guardian report said Wednesday’s rockfall, which had killed climber Andrew Foster of Wales and injured his wife, was seen as a rare event only because it had turned deadly. A sheet of rock estimated to be 130 feet tall, 65 feet wide and between 3 and 10 feet thick broke off from the 3,000-foot-tall granite rock formation during a series of rockfalls that began at 1:52 p.m., NBC reported.

A 2013 report by the United States Geological Survey and the National Park Service reveals that 15 people were killed and at least 85 were injured in 925 rockfalls, rock slides and other so-called slope movements that occurred from 1857 to 2011.

Nicholas Sitar, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley told NYT that rockfalls were normal in Yosemite. According to Sitar, steep rock faces like El Captain were cut into blocks by “regular fractures” or “joints.” Over time, a number of fractures develop due to freezing and thawing of the rock, heating and cooling and gravity. “Eventually, a block or a series of blocks become unstable and they fall,” he said.