Over the past few month , a colossal sheet of paper of swim rockhas been drifting across the Southwest Pacificheaded towards Australia . The strange occurrence has tuck a lot of media and scientific attention since it was first spotted this summer , however , it remained unclear where the pumice stone slew in reality came from .
Now , a team of scientist from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel has pinpointed its origin : an obscure , nameless underwater vent just 50 kilometers ( 31 miles ) northwestern United States of the island of Vava’u in Tonga .
“ In the external scientific lit , it appear so far only under the phone number 243091 or as Volcano F " , Dr Philipp Brandl of GEOMAR , first source of the study , pronounce ina program line .
The pumice stone plane , made up of thousands and thousands of little pumice stone endocarp , first come to light inearly August 2019 . Thanks to its porous structure , the pumice is able to float , work a giant raft that stretched for up to 167 square kilometers ( 64 straightforward miles ) across the sea , around double the sizing of Manhattan .
" On August 9 , 2019 we sailed through a pumice field for 6 to 8 hours , much of the time there was no visible water , " Shannon Lenz , a sailor who film the pumice batch , explain in a YouTube description of their video uploaded at the time . " It was like plowing through a field . We fancy the pumice was at least 6inches thick . "
Reporting in theJournal of vulcanology and Geothermal Research , researchers have manage to locate the source of the pumice using freely accessible images take by the ESA satellite Copernicus Sentinel-2 . They notice clear trace of an active underwater eruption on the Earth’s surface in the Southwest Pacific that paired up perfectly with the resulting pumice overflow .
" The eruption traces fit exactly to Volcano F , " states Dr Brandl . “ There were only two stations that recorded seismic signals of a volcanic eruption . However , their data is consistent with Volcano F as the origin . "
Pumice is sometimes formed when swimming lava erupt from a volcano into the sea . Gases dissolve in the magma and form bubbles that get trapped as the rock rapidly cools by the chilly seawater .
The pumice raft is still cruising and , approximate by its current swiftness and direction , is expected to hit the Great Barrier Reef region at the last of January or beginning of February 2020 . Once it reaches this terminal name and address , the pumice is expected to deck a burden of maritime microorganisms onto the reef that scientist consider could aid to fill again it .
Remarkably , thelargest thick - sea eruptionever recorded is believed to have occurred in 2012 just northwards of New Zealand on the Kermadec bow . This too continued huge amounts of pumice – on median , 9,900 rafts of pumice was producedevery single second – including vast bowlder of SUV - sized rocks .
