Sailors in the South Pacific find themselves sailing through a sea of stone, as an underwater volcanic eruption produced a field of floating pumice stone in the Pacific Ocean.
Sailors in the South Pacific were surprised this month to find themselves sailing through a sea of stone.
“We had heard the previous day on email of pumice fields," the couple wrote on Cruiser Sat Net, an online blog for sailors. As they approached the field, they started seeing floating rocks, some as large as tennis balls.Sometime later they “entered a total rock rubble slick made up of pumice stones from marble to basketball size. The waves were knocked back to almost calm and the boat was slowed to 1 knot [just over 1 mph]. The rubble slick went as far as we could see in the moonlight.
Pumice stone is a highly porous, lightweight volcanic rock, which is why it was able to float to the surface of the ocean. An underwater volcano off the coast of Tonga is thought to have erupted around Aug. 7, according to the blog Volcano Discovery. A NASA satellite first captured an image of the field on Aug. 9, according to the NASA Earth Observatory, which shows the raft to be larger than the island of Manhattan.
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