Slashdot Mirror
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."
...the sailors who made the discovery had the clearest skin that the reporter has ever seen.
It's just Cthulhu turning over in his sleep.
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).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
"Pumice, the lightweight stone used to smooth skin, is usually found in beauty salons."
Ha! I'll use that line next time I see a mechanic wash his hands with a Lava Bar.
Life is not for the lazy.
First time accepted submitter ZombieBraintrust copy and pastes from CNN.com
Seriously?
What did you expect, a land based army?
The NZ Navy is composed of two main groups: the officer corps, and the radio corps. The officer corps directs the radio corps; the radio corps calls for help when things go bad. Their two main geographical zones are west (a phone number for Australia) and east (a phone number for the US).
Another entry for Tobin's Spirit Guide - the most significant event since the 1908 Tunguska cross-rip.
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.
For further terminology bending, the Daily Mail calls it a rock ice-shelf [dailymail.co.uk].
They then go on to blame it on illegal immigrants and ask if it is likely to affect house prices.
However, they haven't yet determined whether pumice is the latest miracle food or whether it's this week's innocuous substance that has been found to cause cancer in those gullible enough to believe scaremongering journalism.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
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.
I have many years ago seen beaches in New Zealand composed entirely of pumice. I saw them north of Gisborne on the North Island and pumice was quite literally the only thing you could see on the beach and it went at least as deep as my hand. On another small beach nearby the surface was covered entirely by pieces of abalone shell - an ancient Maori midden beach I assume but those beaches are all deserted and there's no-one around to ask.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.