The surprised-looking gentleman in the image above is Michael Hoult, and he’s holding a piece of a vast mass of volcanic rock en route to Australia through the Pacific Ocean.

Yeah, we’re on a volcano kick today.

Hoult and his partner Larissa Brill reported sighting the massive sheet of rock on August 15, after coming across the rubble at night while sailing a catamaran to Fiji.

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia says that it’s a floating sheet of pumice rocks, ranging in size from as small as a marble to as big as a basketball.

Pumice rocks are created when magma cools rapidly, which is why scientists think the floating “raft” was likely produced by an underwater volcano near Tonga which erupted sometime around August 7, according to Al Jazeera.

You can see the incredible ‘raft’, which is roughly the size of Manhattan, here:

The cool thing about the pumice stones is that they’re acting like some sort of sea taxi.

In a statement, Scott Bryan, one of the geologists studying the samples provided, said the raft was going to “bring new healthy corals and other reef dwellers to the Great Barrier Reef”.

He later told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the rock mass was probably composed of “billions to trillions of pieces of pumice”, each of which “is a vehicle for some marine organism”.

The Great Barrier Reef has suffered extensive damage in recent years, so the arrival of the raft and its passengers could mean good things for regeneration.

The raft will hit Australian shores in about five months.

[source:aljazeera]