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Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Giant Raft of Pumice

28 August 2019



Volcanoes have a lot of interesting ways to show their appearance. One of the fine and rarely observed displays is the pumice raft. The world’s numerous volcanoes are covered by the waters of the oceans. When the volcanoes erupt, they stain the ocean surface with gases and waste. They also can spew a stack of lava which is lighter than water. These pumice rocks are full of space and holes and they can easily float.

A large raft of pumice is floating in the Pacific Ocean heading over to Australia after an underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga earlier this month. According to NASA Earth Observatory, the massive pumice rock of volcanic rock had been first spotted by sailors on August 9. 

On 13 August 2019, the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 obtained natural-colour imagery of a vast pumice raft floating the tropical Pacific Ocean near Late Island in the Kingdom of Tonga. NASA’s Terra satellite noticed a mass of floating rock on 9 August, the water around the pumice shows that the submarine volcano lies somewhere below. The mass, or the raft, is made up an approximated 1 trillion bits and pieces of pumice, ranging in size from marbles to basketballs.

The vast pumice raft of volcanic rock stretching over 150 square kilometres (58 square miles). The sea of pumice which is the size of 20,000 football fields, it was reported by Australian sailors earlier this month. Sailors have been warned to stay clear of the hazard. Pumice is a lightweight, rick rock which can float in water. It is produced when lava hoes through active cooling and loss of gases.

An Australian couple, Micheal Hoult and Larissa Brill from SailSurfROAM, were sailing their catamaran to Fiji, they were the first to inform about the pumice raft, after unintentionally entering the rubble at night. The Australian couple had collected samples of the pumice. Experts state that large “rafts” of volcanic rock are more likely to form when a volcano is located in more shallow waters. The thing that sailors noticed first was the smell of sulfur.

Micheal Hoult and Larissa Brill had found the pumice raft covering the ocean surface at this location: 18 55' S 175 21' W, at 0800hrs UTC (1900hrs local) 15/8/19.

Queensland University of Technology professor, Scott Bryan said the current pumice raft is moving at around 10 to 30 kilometres per day. Bryan said that these events like this happen every five years which involve trillions of pieces of pumice as small as marble and big as a basketball. "Each piece of pumice is a vehicle for something to attach and grow and be transported across the ocean," Bryan told to CNN. "We will have millions to billions of individuals of tens of different species all arriving en masse along our coastline, all healthy and potentially finding a new home."

It is known that this huge pumice rock can heal the Great Barrier Reef corals in Queensland, Australia, which had been killed in recent years as a result of climate change. Expert states that if the pumice rock reaches to the Great Barrier Reef, it could retain some of the lost marine life. In 2016 and 2017, marine heatwaves caused by climate change resulted in mass bleaching, which killed about half of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef, in line with many others around the world. Professor Bryan had said that "Based on past pumice raft events we have studied over the last 20 years, it's going to bring new healthy corals and other reef-dwellers."

The huge pumice raft is being carried by ocean currents through the South Pacific region, someday washing up on the Australian shores by early next year. As it travels, it will pick and takeup small sea life, from small animals to algae and coral.



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