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The National Corvette Museum is trying to determine how to fish eight vintage Corvettes out of a sinkhole that opened under the floor of its skydome area early Wednesday morning.

Officials were alerted to the sinkhole—estimated to be 40 feet across and 25 feet to 30 feet deep—after security alarms were triggered at 5:45 a.m., according to the museum's website. The museum is located in Bowling Green, Ky. The fire department was summoned and has secured the scene. A structural engineer had been called to assess the situation.

Images of the destruction began lighting up Twitter earlier today. The most detailed photo shows a large section of the grey-carpeted floor pulled away and two Corvettes sitting vertical in the middle of the sinkhole.

The affected vehicles include a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder and 2009 ZR1 Blue Devil, both on loan from General Motors Co. The remaining cars—owned by the museum—include the 1962 Black Corvette, 1984 PPG Pace Car, 1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette, 1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette, 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette and 2009 White 1.5 Millionth Corvette.

The skydome exhibit area is a separate structure that is connected to the main museum. Both were closed to the public Wednesday. The museum is located across the street from GM's Corvette assembly plant.

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After Gobbling Up Corvettes at Museum, Sinkhole Becomes a Star

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — When the earth opened under the National Corvette Museum in early February, creating a 60-foot-deep sinkhole that devoured eight landmark Corvettes, museum officials, Bowling Green residents, and ’Vette lovers everywhere reacted in stunned disbelief.

The news worsened as salvage crews plucked the buried autos from the chasm. A 2001 high-performance Z06 was twisted into an unrecognizable pretzel, shorn of nearly all its red, sheet-molded compound body. Another casualty, though less severely damaged, was the white roadster that had rolled off the assembly line in 1992 to become the nation’s one millionth Corvette.

Since then something unexpected has happened: The sinkhole became the museum’s hot new tourist magnet. Droves of travelers who might otherwise have had little interest in the museum and its four-wheeled exhibits began showing up to see the site of the natural disaster they had heard about on the news.

Attendance is up 59 percent since March compared with the same period last year, museum officials said, and sales at the museum shop and cafe are also showing double-digit increases. In May 2013, the museum pulled in about 9,000 visitors. This May, it drew more than 17,000.