Review
For some reason, whenever you see the sea, you always give people a feeling of fear.
Life is born in the ocean and eventually dies because of the ocean; so whenever there is a vision in the ocean, it may be a disaster.
Recently, scientists have discovered a huge island in the Pacific, which floats completely on the sea and covers more than 150 square kilometers.
What is this concept? A soccer field is about 7,000 square meters, and this island is about 20,000 main stadiums as big as it is, and even Manhattan Island is not as big as it. Is there another disaster at sea? This time is really different, scientists see this kind of thing is not worried and happy, what is going on?
Floating "pumice raft" on the ocean
In August 2019, the Holt and Brill couple were planning to sail their catamaran to Fiji; the voyage was expected to take a month, passing through Norfolk Island but not off the Pacific route.
For the first ten days, the sea was calm and calm, and the couple felt the leisurely sea breeze during the day, fixed the ship at night to sleep, and sometimes drove overnight, and everything went smoothly in the plan.
But on the night of August 14, their catamaran was in the pumice ruins that had inadvertently sailed toward the surface of the ocean, and by the time the couple woke up suddenly, the hull was stuck in the pumice.
With the help of the faint light cast by the moon, the two saw that the dark sea was full of dense rubble, which did not have much resistance to the hull, but a large amount of rubble was piled together to form a "pumice raft", blocking the way of the catamaran.
The two men took great pains to remove the hull from the jammed out of the rubble, and by this time the sea was already in the sea, and they sailed out of the sea with the help of the waves.
On August 16, the couple shared this dangerous experience on social media, and they did not know why there were so many pumice stones on the calm sea, and Brill also collected some pumice stones as specimens and published the appearance of pumice stones to netizens.
In fact, the Brier couple are not the only sea tourists to encounter pumice stones, and on August 17, Australian sailor Shannon Lenz also posted a "legendary experience" on YouTube.
While sailing the Pacific Ocean on a fishing boat, he also encountered a "pumice raft" made of many gravel, and in the spirit of adventure he sailed in the pumice raft for nearly 8 hours, but still did not see the end of the gravel.
It was as if he himself had fallen into a sea of rubble, and the fishing boats were moving through the pumice rafts as if they were plowing in a field.
The pumice stones were no more than 15 centimeters thick at most, and Shannon Lenz didn't know where they came from or why they were so largely concentrated in the Pacific Ocean. But when he shared the video on social media, he quickly got the answer from the mouths of professionals.
Bryan, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology who studies geological samples, said it was common to encounter pumice in the waters off the heart of Australia and Tonga.
About every five years, these pumice stones appear, and from a distance, they think it is an island floating in the sea, until they get closer to find that the sea is surrounded by pumice.
Pumice rafts have many benefits
So where do these pumice stones come from? The answer is simple: volcanic eruptions! Just a few days before sea tourists discovered the island, there was another undersea volcanic eruption near Tonga, a close to Fiji.
The volcano erupted on August 7 and did not end until the evening of August 9, and these pumice stones are the volcano's gift to the ocean, pieces of pumice of uniform thickness.
Some geologists have said that when the submarine volcano is located on the shallow seabed, the rocks that erupt from them may form "pumice rafts" when they meet water.
These pumice stones are the product of rapid cooling of magma, most of them weigh less than 10g, and are a kind of rock rich in bubble-like structures; because there are many vents inside the rock, they can easily float on the surface of the sea, rather than sinking directly to the bottom like other rocks.
However, from the satellite imagery, the scale of the Tonga submarine volcanic eruption is not small, and the total area covered by the magma it spews out after cooling is more than 150 kilometers, which is equivalent to the size of 2 football fields. In terms of the volume of a single piece of pumice, there are at least a trillion pieces of pumice here, and it is difficult for Shannon Lenz to sail in it for 8 hours in a fishing boat.
So many pumice stones appear on the surface of the sea, will not have a bad impact on the ecological environment of the Pacific Ocean? Scientists said that instead of doing so, the appearance of pumice represents a good thing.
It turns out that after the seabed magma is cooled by the sea, the pumice formed will follow the currents to do a stable movement, which means that they can become home to marine life and help transport organisms across the ocean.
What concept is this similar to? Australia's Great Barrier Reef is well known to everyone, this is the longest coral reef group in the world, stretching for more than 2011 kilometers.
The existence of the Great Barrier Reef provides a habitat for tens of thousands of fish, including migratory cod, nesting turtles, and spawning salmon. According to incomplete statistics, at least 30 species of whales and dolphins live in the Great Barrier Reef, and 6 of the world's 7 great turtle species live on the Great Barrier Reef; in addition to at least 242 species of birds and half of the world's mangroves.
See here we understand, Australia near the pumice raft and the Great Barrier Reef have the same properties, both sides can provide living space for marine life, once its area exceeds a certain level, it can form a stable ecosystem, there will be more and more marine life around the pumice raft to survive, here is the true sense of the ocean paradise.
epilogue
For endangered marine life, the appearance of pumice rafts provides them with a relatively stable living environment, although the surface of the pumice raft is bare at first, but it will not be long before there will be creatures attached to it, birds and fish will also come, and it will become a lively sea paradise.