Slashdot Mirror
Birth of an Island
slashmojo writes that while some islands are sinking, last August another rose from the ocean, formed by volcanic activity and caught in the act by a passing yacht. From the article: "What looked like a brown stain on the South Pacific turned out to be a spectacular drift of floating pumice stones stretching more than 16 km — and an indication an island was being born nearby... 'We are getting emails from volcanologists saying this is so rare.'" Here is the blog post of the yachtsman who photographed the nascent island.
What IS the international protocol for claiming a new island? My flag first, nearest neighbour?
I hope scientists can get some cool information out of his. And perhaps footage of the island forming...maybe some time-lapse photography or something. That would be neat-o.
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
Call it what you will, but I'm not one to consider a proclamation of belief in a personal god to be 'Insightful'.
For those unaqainted with the subject of newly-formed islands, the only previous recorded example was Surtsey, just off the south coast of Iceland, which appeared in a volcanic event in 1965 or so.
Surtsey has been a neat case-study in the colonization of land-life in an area previously devoid of it, but has unfortunately (yet wisely) been off-limits to non-scientists.
First one to the island gets mildly radioactive beachfront property that will either blow up in another eruption or get washed away by big waves. Save it for the great-great-grandkids.
Are you joking, or truly an idiot? (Or do you work for Big Oil?) Why would there suddenly be an increase in volcanic activity in the last 50 years?
The increase in CO2 over the last century would cause an increase in water temperature as well...
Am I the only one who thinks we should agree to leave this new island pristine and uninhabited and study it as nature takes hold? I think it would be fascinating to watch as plants then birds then whatever else begin to colonize the island. Perhaps in a few hundred to a few thousand years we'd see some natural selection a la Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands.
No kidding. I was sailing from New Zealand to Vanuatu when this happened. Our ham radio was awash in traffic as this thing surfaced. The problem with pumice is that it floats on the water and reduces the surface tension. When your boat goes through it, you get all your expensive ablative paint scraped off...and then you sink a few feet into the water. If you don't have enough freeboard (the amount of boat height from waterline to decking), then you *will* sink. The other thing is that you can't actually use your motor very well, so you have try to sail out...this is obviously a problem during nighttime when you can't see anything and you end up running right into it. That'll wake you up.