Massive underwater submarine volcanic eruption creates small island of floating pumice

“Each piece of pumice has its own little community that has been transported across the world’s oceans – and we have had trillions of pieces of this pumice floating out there following the eruption,” says geologist Scott Bryan from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.”Each piece of pumice is a home, and a vehicle for an organism, and it’s just tremendous. The sheer numbers of individuals and this diversity of species is being transported thousands of kilometers in only a matter of months is really quite phenomenal.” Bryan knows a thing or two about these pumice migrations. He’s been studying the volcanic rafts for 20 years, investigating the 2001 eruption, its 2019 successor (which started washing up on Australian shores in April), and other underwater eruptions as well.

His most recent study, published last month, examined the 2012 eruption of the Havre Seamount, also in the South Pacific – estimated to be the largest underwater volcano eruption ever recorded, broadly equivalent to the most powerful volcanic eruption on land in the 20th century. That event produced a gigantic raft of pumice rock that ended up dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand – in addition to littering the seafloor with giant chunks of pumice the size of vans. –Science Alert