Gigantic Raft of Volcanic Rock is Drifting Toward Australia. That Could be Good News.
martyb writes:
Gigantic Raft of Volcanic Rock is Drifting Toward Australia. That Could be Good News.:
A huge raft of volcanic rock has been spotted in the Pacific Ocean, and the Manhattan-size mass appears to be drifting slowly toward Australia.
As it floats along, scientists said various marine plants and animals would populate the loose collection of light, porous rock - and that their arrival and dispersal Down Under could help revive portions of the Great Barrier Reef that have been damaged by pollution and the warmer, more acidic waters resulting from climate change.
The mass, which was spotted on Aug. 9 by NASA's Terra satellite, is made up of an estimated 1 trillion bits of pumice ranging in size from marbles to basketballs. All of the material is believed to have come from the eruption of an underwater volcano near the island nation of Tonga in early August.
"If you think about the eruption like a bottle of Coke or Champagne, and you shake it up and take the lid off, there's all that foam that comes out," said Scott Bryan, a geologist at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. "If we solidify that foam, that's basically what pumice is when it cools and falls back down to the ocean."
[...] "These billions and billions of rock can carry corals, and in the best-case scenario, they spread these little corals through the Southwest Pacific and resettle on the Great Barrier Reef," said Martin Jutzeler, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, in Australia, and an expert on underwater volcanoes.
Even if only 0.1 percent of the pumice rocks deliver baby corals that successfully colonize the Great Barrier Reef, Bryan said, that could represent hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of new corals added to the imperiled reef.
Does that make the pumice a coral corral?
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