Huge Pumice Rock 'Island' Seen Floating In South Pacific 104
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."
Reportedly... (Score:5, Funny)
...the sailors who made the discovery had the clearest skin that the reporter has ever seen.
Re:Reportedly... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reportedly... (Score:5, Funny)
In related news, Joan Rivers took a swim in the Pacific yesterday and emerged without her makeup.
And an animal rescue team promptly helped the hideous creature back into the ocean, although some wanted to keep it for study, being unable to determine it's species.
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Nothing to worry about... (Score:5, Funny)
It's just Cthulhu turning over in his sleep.
Re:Nothing to worry about... (Score:5, Funny)
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Do you want to get fucked by a volcano having a "nocturnal emission"? Proper fucked?
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Tobin's Spirit Guide (Score:5, Funny)
Another entry for Tobin's Spirit Guide - the most significant event since the 1908 Tunguska cross-rip.
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not exactly an island (Score:5, Informative)
If it's like previous pumice rafts [wikipedia.org], it's more like a large area of debris than a big island. Here's a random photo [visualphotos.com] 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 [nasa.gov] is a NASA satellite photo of a 2006 occurrence with a more obvious origin (it's adjacent to an erupting volcano).
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More like Hawaii Vista
Re:not exactly an island (Score:4, Informative)
That one, it turns out, is even less of an island, and mostly not even visible: the "great Pacific garbage patch" is not really [straightdope.com] 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 (Score:5, Funny)
You tell 'em Mitt!
And who knows where this "plastic" even came from. The science is still out on that, there's no evidence that its even man made...
Re:not exactly an island (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mean to imply at all that it's not an environmental problem, just that it's not a picturesque one consisting of a giant island of floating plastic milk jugs and lawn furniture. In some ways the reality is worse, because at least in principle you could clean up macroscopic waste (though it'd be very hard), but it's basically impossible to filter flecks of plastic from the ocean.
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Re:not exactly an island (Score:5, Informative)
If you click through to TFA's TFA [theaustralian.com.au], 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 [dailymail.co.uk]. They also have a pic of it that looks more frothy than island or ice-shelf like.
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I like the part where they include a bunch of gratuitous photos of actual ice shelves.
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Actually, that sounds like a good one for the Mythbusters!
Faily Fail (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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'The rock looked to be sitting two foot (half a metre) above the surface of the waves and lit up a brilliant while colour in the spotlight. It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf.'
Sooo, maybe something big!
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Why yes, I have seen a satellite photo of Late.
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Convince hippies it's a green place to live. Drop them off with buckets of paper mache to glue it together. Don't go back.
It's the navy of the Molemen! (Score:1)
They've finally worked out their disagreements with Atlantis and have united to force the Surface world to bow to their will!
Is there no treachery beneath them?
He's waking up! (Score:3, Insightful)
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That pumice is from a thing which makes Cthulhu look as innocent as the Geico gecko.
It fell off when my mother-in-law was stoning her corns.
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Seriously?
What did you expect, a land based army?
Re:New Zealand has a navy??? (Score:5, Funny)
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).
Re:New Zealand has a navy??? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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> "Royal Navy" is British.
So is New Zealand. "... united by common allegiance to the Crown."
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The Crown is a separate entity to that of the countries - there is a Queen of New Zealand, who happens to also be the Queen of England (and several other places, such as Australia and Canada), and the Crown is united, while the parliament of Great Britain has no say or power in the other countries. So no, New Zealand isn't British.
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Cool. That means that bunch of inbred twits has multiple depositions to look forward to.
I hope they burn through their money and have to get real jobs.
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The fucking royal family will eventually be fired multiple times by multiple nations.
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Though they weren't given permission to actuall dock in Pearl Harbour. Possibly because we (New Zealanders) don't allow nuclear powered vesseles in our waters.
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Re:New Zealand has a navy??? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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So what your saying is you have Coast Guard you call a Navy?
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Yes, just don't ask about our Air Force. You've already seen that, the entirety of it raided Kim Dotcom's house.
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Life imitating Pratchett (Score:3)
But I'll keep waiting for the news about the turtle and the elephants :-).
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Great for removing paint from moving ships and polishing their propellers too.
Fixed the summary for you (Score:5)
Re:Fixed the summary for you (Score:4, Funny)
So.. Fareed Zakaria got a new job??
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And yet he submitted an article from MSNBC...
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Re:Fixed the summary for you (Score:5, Funny)
mother earth is changing her own climate? (Score:1, Troll)
The pumice in these islands was created by underwater volcanos. How much heat are these conspirators against humanity putting into our oceans? Maybe THEY are to blame for the melting ice caps?
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Not a chance. The heat receive from the Sun and retained by the Earth is several orders of magnitude greater than all volcanoes put together. Volcanoes are insignificant in that regard.
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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn (Score:3)
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An island rising in the south Pacific can mean only one thing!
Lex Luthor finally gotten rid of that pesky illegal immigrant and can continue his real estate development!
Nature (Score:1)
Fuck! Nature is amazing!
$25 a ton (Score:3)
It could be scooped up and sold, but at $25 a ton, it's not worth it.
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Not sure where you got that price from. If it's actually "consumer grade" (i.e. appropriate for use on skin) you could make a killing making these [amazon.co.uk]
Re:$25 a ton (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure where you got that price from.
USGS Minerals Industry Summary - Pumice [usgs.gov]. That's the bulk price.
There are "Trash Hunter [aquarius-systems.com] 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 [unsw.edu.au], 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.
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Not sure where you got that price from.
Lake Dredge Appraisal? [youtube.com]
WoW expansion pak (Score:2)
it is a stunt by Blizzard to draw attention to the upcomong expansion pak for WoW, which involves a floating island.
Spidermonkey Island? (Score:2)
Don't Tell the US Congress (Score:1)
If Hank Johnson (US Representative) learns about this, he'll worry about NZ capsizing.
Dharma Initiative (Score:2)
Just enter the code every 108 minutes and we'll all be OK.
Unlike Guam (Score:2)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1WSs9B4H5s [youtube.com]
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/guamtip.asp [snopes.com]
"Yeah, my fear is that the whole island [Guam] will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize." I love the look on the other guy's face, trying not to laugh at a congressman in formal hearings.
Beaches of pum,ice (Score:5, Interesting)
OMG do something ! (Score:1)
Quick - something from the earth is oozing out and polluting the ocean - we must find a big corporation to blame. We must mobilize the media to identify the culprit and immediately begin aid operations to the millions of people and fish that will be affected by this disaster
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