Strands of pumice curl around L’Esperance Rock in this satellite image collected on August 24, 2012. Pumice is light gray, water is near-black, and the sparsely vegetated island is red in the false-color image.
The pumice was erupted in mid-july by the Havre Seamount, an underwater volcano about 50 kilometers (30 miles) to the northwest. In the weeks following the eruption, pumice spread throughout the Kermadec Islands, a volcanic archipelago extending north of New Zealand. The image was acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) aboard the Terra satellite.
References & Resources
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using data from the NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.
