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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.
God giveth and God taketh away....
all balances out in the end we are just a small part of His PLAN
So when the earth gets a floater in the pool, it's one big mutha. Try fishing that out with a net
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Sounds fair.
:-)
First one to the new island gets the prime beachfront property!
You usually think of these structures as having been around for at least as long as civilization, but clearly the Earth is ever-changing... very cool.
l /ainakumuwaiislandformation.htm
Here's a decent intro to island formation:
http://www.hawaii.edu/environment/ainakumuwai/htm
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.
"So" is not a synonym of "very".
I think you meant: "So" is so not a synonym of "very".
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
"slashmojo writes that while some islands are sinking, last August another rose from the ocean [CC] [MD] [GC], formed by volcanic activity and caught in the act by a passing yacht."
:)
See. I told you rich people are good for something.
This is really neat, but doesn't it strike anybody as odd that they decided to sail
*towards* an active volcano? Were they trying to get a last minute entry into the 2006 Darwin Awards or something?
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Between recent plans to map under Greenland's ice to find the home of the Elder Things and Shoggoths, and now this, I think it's obvious H.P. Lovecraft's prophecy is coming true.
All glory to Cthulhu.
First post!
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
...caught in the act by a passing yacht.
Nosy environmnetalists and their cameras. Worst than the paparazzi on a Saturday night.
Its fascinating that something like this, in the age of of satellite monitoring, global communications, Google Earth, can happen without vulcanologists aware of it. Its possible that military organizations detected it & then dismissed it as outside their purview & didn't pass it on, in any case it's unfortunate that such a rare event escaped study. Hopefully we'll soon see automated earth science 'anomaly' expert systems processing realtime data and alerting relevant specialists.
On the other hand, it's impressive that there were people there! That the human species is so ubiquitous on planet Earth that a random bunch of folks happened to be sailing in proximity, in what was historically one of the most isolate places on the planet. It really does bring home that there are now more folks alive today then have died in the history of our species, that we're now regularly witnessing these one-in-a-million (but what is that to six billion?!) events!
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I call dibs.
Quite simply, you claim it's yours and it's yours unless somebody else with a bigger gun says so.
Now if I saw an island being formed, I would anchor my yacht offshore, wait for the land to cool, then plant a flag claiming it in the name of my new sovereign nation... Even if it's just a small island, it would still be cool to be the ruler of an island nation...
A man can dream...
Read my blog posts on usability.
Depends on where its at. This particular island lies within the already recognized territorial waters of Tonga, so it belongs to them. Since most new islands would form in volcanic chains with pre-existing atolls and islands, this is likely to be the case the vast majority of the time.
If you did manage to spot an island forming outside of the territorial waters of another nation, the biggest gun rule generally applies. You can claim it yourself and try to create your own nation, but good luck defending it when someone with bigger guns than you decides to grab it. Until you have a settled population on the island, nobody is going to care that some lone nut got kicked off a speck of rock in the middle of the ocean. He who had the biggest guns wins. Until you actually get a population, nobody is going to recognize you as a nation. As a example, the Republic of Minerva was set up in the 1970's on infill located on an unclaimed atoll...basically, a bunch of dirt was piled on an atoll to create an artificial island. Nobody paid much attention to the island or the builders claims, and eventually Tonga sent their army over, evicted the guy, and claimed the island for themselves. Since there was no actual population living on the island, little attention was paid to the "invasion". The people involved in building the island still whine about their claim and call themselves the "government in exile", but without a population to represent or an army to defend themselves, they're little more than a paper organization. The island, as I understand it, was allowed to erode back into the sea. Only a few narrow spits of land ringing the reefs remain.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
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.
What a great story for the new year, but it should be said that this island formed this past august.
h ownh.php3?img_id=13971
Someone posted these links to satellite pics on the blog page.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01899
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/s
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.