  It is argued that the adjoint torelon loop, i.e. a Polyakov loop in the
adjoint representation running in a spatial, rather than temporal, direction,
is an observable which is sensitive to the presence of long color electric flux
tubes at high temperatures. We show via lattice Monte Carlo simulations that
this observable has a sharp peak at the deconfinement transition, remains much
larger than the vacuum value for some range of $T>T_c$, and falls below the
vacuum value for $T > 2T_c$. This result suggests that long electric flux tubes
may persist for a finite range of temperatures past the deconfinement
transition, and at some stage disappear, presumably melting into a plasma of
gluons. As a side remark, we point out that our results at $T<T_c$ imply that
the eigenvalues of ordinary Polyakov loop holonomies in the confinement phase
have a slight tendency to attract rather than repel, which may be relevant to
certain models of confinement.
