Huge Pumice Rock 'Island' Seen Floating In South Pacific

First time accepted submitter ZombieBraintrust writes "Pumice, the lightweight stone used to smooth skin, is usually found in beauty salons, but on Thursday sailors from New Zealand's Royal Navy found nearly 10,000 square miles of the lava rock bobbing on the surface of the South Pacific Ocean."

Comments

not exactly an island

[Trepidity]

If it's like previous pumice rafts, it's more like a large area of debris than a big island. Here's a random photo showing a boat plowing a path through one made up of smaller pieces. Not really the kind of thing you can walk around on, though the description of this one having an edge like an ice-shelf makes it sound like it may have larger rocks in it. Here is a NASA satellite photo of a 2006 occurrence with a more obvious origin (it's adjacent to an erupting volcano).

Re:not exactly an island

[Trepidity]

That one, it turns out, is even less of an island, and mostly not even visible: the "great Pacific garbage patch" is not really a macroscopic phenomenon, but rather an area of the Pacific Ocean with higher than normal concentrations of plastic particles, mostly suspended beneath the surface. The larger pieces are broken down by wave action fairly quickly, so it's not a giant mass of floating milk jugs or anything like that.

Re:not exactly an island

[Spiridios]

If you click through to TFA's TFA, you'll see they properly used the term "raft" unlike MSN. They also mentioned that their vessel plowed right through it, even though "The rock appeared to be sitting above the surface of the waves and when lit up looked like the edge of an ice shelf."

For further terminology bending, the Daily Mail calls it a rock ice-shelf. They also have a pic of it that looks more frothy than island or ice-shelf like.

Re:$25 a ton

[Animats]

Not sure where you got that price from.

USGS Minerals Industry Summary - Pumice. That's the bulk price.

There are "Trash Hunter boats that could pick up pumice, but they're not intended for remote open-ocean operations. To collect this stuff, it would take booms and ocean-going tugs or fishing boats to concentrate the floating pumice, a collection vessel to pull it out of the water and screen it, and a bulk freighter to haul it to some customer. It's like cleaning up an oil spill, except that it's a solid. It might be desirable to do this if the mess drifts to a populated area.

Over time, wave action breaks the stuff up, opens the gas pockets that make it float, and it sinks. This takes about a year, so it's not a long term problem. It happens now and then. Known events off Tonga in 1964 and 2002 have been studied. Long-term impact is low; it's hard to tell, a few years later, that it ever happened.

Re:New Zealand has a navy???

[Bitsy Boffin]

We are a small nation surrounded by a vast expanse of water, we have a number of our own islands or those which we administer, hundreds even thousands of kilometers distant, we have Antarctic claims to the south and regularly need to render assistance to Polynesian islands to the north, and importantly we have economic and environmental interests to police in a large area of ocean.

So yes, we do have a Navy.

It's not a Navy of pure war ships though, you're not going to find a destroyer, a carrier, or a submarine in our fleet. Our ships are by necessity multi role.

Re:New Zealand has a navy???

[geezer nerd]

And New Zealand does have an army (and an air force) in addition to a navy. All organizations are very small, and are not set up for offensive warfare. They are most often used for humanitarian missions. There is a contingent of the NZ Army SAS active in Afghanistan for several years now.

And, going back to the original posting, the proper term for the navy of NZ is "Royal New Zealand Navy", not "New Zealand Royal Navy". "Royal Navy" is British.