The blast happened around 4 a.m. in Elberton, about 100 miles east of Atlanta, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.
authorities released a video from the explosion at the six-foot-tall monument known as the Georgia Guidestones. It shows much of the granite slab falling apart and collapsing. No one was injured, officials said.
A second video shows a car leaving the site shortly after the explosion.
For safety reasons, the structure has been “completely demolished”, according to the GBI.
The four vertical plates that dominate the Guidestones are engraved on the front and back with 10 principles, each side in a different modern language. The keystone is inscribed in the alphabets of early human civilizations – Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, Sanskrit and classical Greek.
Since its inception in 1980, there has been a mystery surrounding who paid for and wrote the monument.