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posted by chromas on Monday September 09 2019, @07:20AM   Printer-friendly

Gigantic Raft of Volcanic Rock is Drifting Toward Australia. That Could be Good News.:

A huge raft of volcanic rock has been spotted in the Pacific Ocean, and the Manhattan-size mass appears to be drifting slowly toward Australia.

As it floats along, scientists said various marine plants and animals would populate the loose collection of light, porous rock — and that their arrival and dispersal Down Under could help revive portions of the Great Barrier Reef that have been damaged by pollution and the warmer, more acidic waters resulting from climate change.

The mass, which was spotted on Aug. 9 by NASA’s Terra satellite, is made up of an estimated 1 trillion bits of pumice ranging in size from marbles to basketballs. All of the material is believed to have come from the eruption of an underwater volcano near the island nation of Tonga in early August.

“If you think about the eruption like a bottle of Coke or Champagne, and you shake it up and take the lid off, there’s all that foam that comes out,” said Scott Bryan, a geologist at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “If we solidify that foam, that’s basically what pumice is when it cools and falls back down to the ocean.”

[...] “These billions and billions of rock can carry corals, and in the best-case scenario, they spread these little corals through the Southwest Pacific and resettle on the Great Barrier Reef,” said Martin Jutzeler, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, in Australia, and an expert on underwater volcanoes.

Even if only 0.1 percent of the pumice rocks deliver baby corals that successfully colonize the Great Barrier Reef, Bryan said, that could represent hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of new corals added to the imperiled reef.

Does that make the pumice a coral corral?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Pav on Monday September 09 2019, @08:30AM (2 children)

    by Pav (114) on Monday September 09 2019, @08:30AM (#891588)

    "Build the wall" before Trump... hiding and/or justifying the same tax cuts, privatisation etc... and these conservatives have us nosediving and on the verge of a recession. They're also putting in place bans on cash transactions over a certain amount (with the legislation able to be tweaked in the case of a fiscal emergency, which we're about to have). This cash ban has been foreshadowed by IMF papers [imf.org] on how to enable strongly negative interest rates ie. how the banks can take your money even when your bank account is in the black. If cash transactions are limited or banned you can't pull cash out of your bank and hide it under a pillow... and the banks are free to implement negative interest rates so you owe the banks interest for holding YOUR money. India and Sweden have also taken steps to reduce the use of cash, but only New Zealand has been honest enough to say that their limiting of cash is to "save the economy" with negative interest rates ie. by defrauding the middle class to keep alive collapsing banks.

        Even after nosediving over recent years we in Australia have three times the median wealth of the USA, but before the conservatives took power we had five times... FIVE TIMES the USA's median wealth. The reason we've previously done so well is our "Bernie Sanders" (ie. Gough Whitlam) was voted in during the early 1970's just as the USA voted in Reagan. Both of these leaders had a long term effect on their respective countries. USAians will be cheated out of a Bernie presidency again, but in an alternative universe this is how Bernies funeral would sound [youtube.com].

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Monday September 09 2019, @10:20AM

    by Bot (3902) on Monday September 09 2019, @10:20AM (#891613) Journal

    Funnily enough the cash transaction limits have been placed and enforced by the left, around here, and the new government leaders talk about traceability so it is gonna get worse.

    Yesterday the ex commies leader proclaimed "we want direct election of the head of the United States of Europe government". Now a question arises, how anybody but a well oiled puppet can aspire to be palatable to German Greek and Hungarian electors?

    Anyway thank you, fucking communists, for taking three world war (two military and an economuc one) and getting rid of aristocracy and clerics so we can get under an emperor and the new order religion (courtesy of Vatican&Mecca Inc.).

    --
    Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Monday September 09 2019, @11:54PM

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Monday September 09 2019, @11:54PM (#891945)

    "IT WILL BE A GREAT, GREAT BARRIER!"