A " Volcanic " Visitor !

Next year the east coast of Australia will receive a phenomenon that some religious people may construe as a plague heralding the end of the world.  A massive field of floating pumice stone will wash onto our beaches and the continuous wave action will erode it away until it becomes beach sand.

Pumice is something we equate with volcanoes and it is something to be feared.   In 79 AD the Mount Vesuvius volcano on the Italian coast erupted and sent a shower of pumice high into the air.  This drifted across a waterway and settled on the coastal city of Pompeii.   Those pumice flakes coated both the houses and the population and they were entombed and forgotten, until in recent times we started to exhume this relic from the past.   We now have a window into the type of society that existed at the time of the great Roman empire.

The world is encircled by volcanoes in what we call the " ring of fire " and that runs through Indonesia to our north.  We envisage a volcano as a mountain with smoke coming from its peak but the biggest surface of planet earth is the sea and there are many volcanoes hidden beneath the oceans.
It is one of these in the Pacific that has erupted and disgorged a huge amount of pumice that is now floating on the surface,

The timing of its arrival here can not be accurately predicted because its movement will be governed by wind and currents, but there is an expectation that it will be early next year and probably during the height of our summer.  It is quite probable that it will take the form of a huge carpet of floating pumice stone, giving the impression of land stretching to the horizon.   That is not so unusual as we would suppose.    We regularly get pumice washed up on our beaches, but this is in far greater volume than we have experienced before.

This news is creating excitement amongst scientists tasked with trying to save the Great Barrier reef from bleaching caused by increasing air and sea temperatures.  There is the expectation that a floating raft of pumice may save the reef by shading it from the sun and allowing it time to regenerate, but that will depend on how long it takes wave action to grind it back to sand.   Even a brief respite this coming summer would be helpful.

We are a nation versed in water sports and what is heading our way is a step into the unknown.  We will have to learn to live with a raft of pumice on the water surface and we have no idea how long this will last.   It will obviously be subjected to the actions of wind and tide and beach deposits will vary accordingly.   Mixed with cement, this pumice may be a useful ingredient where sea walls are needed to stop beach erosion.   Ground to a powder it may become a useful ingredient for the building industry.

This seems to be another of nature's blessings.  It will certainly be welcome if it saves the Great Barrier reef.  Undoubtedly, some clever people will find a way to make money from its presence.