A sprinkling of pumice is beginning to arrive in Australia after a long journey across the Southwest Pacific. The visiting volcanic raft has also brought a living space to its new location in the form of millions of reef-building organisms that could benefit from the Great Barrier Reef.
The enormous field of pumice, consisting of vibrations of small separate puber stones, was sprayed out in August 2019 by an underwater volcano found off the northwest coast of the island of Vava’u in Tonga. Pumice is formed when liquid lava emerges from a volcano in the sea and cools rapidly. It gets its porous structure through gases that have bubbled through the foaming magma as it cools.
At its greatest extent, the driving field of puberty was ruined 167 square miles (64 square miles) in size, about twice the size of Manhattan.
Scientists knew it was towards Australia, but now more and more pieces of pumice are arriving on the beaches in southeastern Queensland. Associate Professor Scott Bryan of the Queensland University of Technology has been researching the beaches since puberty since April 2020. He hopes the pup will rejuvenate some of Australia’s coral reefs by bringing in new healthy corals and other biological material that a ride on the road.
“Every piece of pumice is a house, and a car for an organism, and it’s just amazing,” Professor Bryan said in a statement. “The sheer number of people and this variety of species being transported thousands of miles in just a few months is really quite phenomenal.”
“In total, we have identified more than 100 different species at puberty – a huge variety of plants and animals,” he added.
However, some scientists have claimed that the original story of the flutter became sensational after the media announced that it would ‘save the Great Barrier Reef.’ Others are also more skeptical about the life-giving properties of adolescent fat. Dr. Rebecca Albright, a coral biologist from the California Academy of Sciences, told Scientific American in 2019: “By the time the tumultuous Australia reaches, there lives a diverse community of living things. But will corals be big players? No, absolutely not. ”
“It could actually shake the reef,” she added.
While Professor Bryan also believes that puberty will not be enough to save the troubled Great Barrier Reef, he hopes it will at least add some new life to the coasts of Australia.
“It’s almost like a vitamin shot for the Great Barrier Reef,” he said. But, “adolescent flights alone will not directly reduce the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef.”
