Under water volcanoes, both shallow and deep, erupt more often than we think. When an exceptionally large underwater volcano erupts, the lava that is produced cools quickly, trapping gas bubbles within the rock. This forms pumice, a highly vesicular, highly porous rock that is light enough to float on water.
Large enough volumes of pumice can be violently ejected during eruptions, rising to the surface of the ocean to form floating rafts of pumice. Such pumice rafts have been seen after historical eruptions such as Krakatoa erupting in 1883, spewing pumice into the ocean and clogging harbors in Indonesia.
Until recently, it was thought that only shallow water or near-shore volcanic eruptions formed these floating rafts of pumice. The 2012 eruption at the Havre Seamount, a deep submarine volcano located in the southwest Pacific (near New Zealand), changed that understanding when it erupted enough pumice to form a floating pumice raft covering over 400 square kilometers of water.
These floating pumice rafts can cause several problems for ships at sea. Floating several hundreds of kilometers away from the location of the eruption, the pumice threaten ships that intake water as part of the ships motion, possibly causing engines to stall.
This research group is hoping that their model can be developed to trace where the pumice rafts originated from, providing a better understanding of the creation of these rafts and the materials that the pumice is composed of. This has several implications in the geologic field in understanding what eruption products float and what eventually sinks, becoming part of the rock record.