
Giant Pumice Raft Floating Towards Australia Could Replenish Great Barrier Reef - bretpiatt
https://www.tpr.org/post/giant-pumice-raft-floating-towards-australia-could-help-replenish-great-barrier-reef
======
jdnenej
I expect the Australian government is looking for a way they can collect up
the rocks to sell. Or better yet, give them away for free for someone else to
sell.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> a way they can collect up the rocks to sell

FYI, yes you can sell pumice, it has uses:

e.g. [https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pumice](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pumice)

~~~
a012
I think you misread a sarcasm comment, I read it to satire Australian gov. who
give away to the corporates that exploit environment (the Great Barrier Reef)
for profits[0].

[0]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/14/campaign...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/14/campaigners-
criticise-reckless-approval-adani-mine-australia)

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Oh, I get that this is sarcasm at the Australian government's usual pro-
corporate anti-environment attitudes. The best sarcasm tends to makes a weird
kind of sense, e.g. yes you can actually sell these rocks.

~~~
ryan_j_naughton
This lead me down quite a rabbit hole to answer the following question: would
it be economical to collect and sell this pumice?

Because the original joke and your comment were both premised on how we
valuing things / create valuations for things, and at its core, this is was
why the field of environmental economics exists.

Prior to environmental economics, we had capitalists saying non-market
environmental goods (e.g. the existence/conservation of whales, conserved
lands / national parks, etc) are not worth anything bc they don't have a
market value. And on the other extreme you had environmentalists who were
claiming that these goods are priceless / immeasurable / infinite value.

The chasm between 0 and infinite didn't leave much room for these two sides to
compromise. And so the field of non-market valuation was born. It attempts to
value non-market goods by calculating the positive and negative externalities
of these goods. Thus, in the case of the Great Barrier Reef, we could attempt
to calculate how much effect this pumice raft would have on the health of the
reef and then we would calculate how much value the reef provides through its
biodiversity.

Even if we are extremely underestimating the value, a lower bound estimate is
still better than is being valued at 0.[1]

And then we can estimate the internalized market value of this good. i.e. what
would the market pay given current market prices for pumice? And what is the
cost of harvesting this pumice versus other pumice. Because other pumice
doesn't have these potential environmental benefits. It simply sits on the
ground or underground close to the surface.

So if the costs of these 2 sources of pumice are close but the benefits of the
sea raft pumice is much higher, than the government should put a Pigouvian
tax[2] on the raft pumice to discourage its harvesting (or simply ban such
harvesting).

But I would wager this is all a fruitless conversation because I bet the cost
of harvesting the sea raft pumice is much higher than the cost of harvesting
land pumice.

Pumice Prices (closer to retail)[3]: \- $7-18 per pound for cement mix \- $2-9
per stone for scrubbing, cleaning, and exfoliating \- $8-16 per pound for
powder use in makeup and exfoliating body scrubs

Given that pumice is mined via open pit mining, it is very cheap,
economical/efficient, and environmentally friendly:

>The mining of pumice is an environmentally friendly process compared with
other mining methods because the igneous rock is deposited on the surface of
the earth in loose aggregate form. The material is mined by open pit methods.
Soils are removed by machinery in order to obtain more pure quality pumice.
Scalping screens are used to filter impure surficial pumice of organic soils
and unwanted rocks. Blasting is not necessary because the material is
unconsolidated, therefore only simple machinery is used such as bulldozers and
power shovels. Different sizes of pumice are needed for specific uses
therefore crushers are used to achieve desired grades ranging from lump,
coarse, intermediate, fine and extra fine.
...[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumice#Mining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumice#Mining)

[https://hesspumice.com/pumice-pages/why-pumice/pumice-
define...](https://hesspumice.com/pumice-pages/why-pumice/pumice-defined.html)

I don't think harvesting from the ocean would be cheaper than using simple
bulldozers to fill trucks. Given that it then needs to be dry, the energy
costs of ocean pumice would be much higher (even if the initial harvesting
could be comparable in cost).

Thus, no intervention is needed because no one would even think about
harvesting this pumice...

[1] A simple example is using the travel cost method from non-market valuation
to value a national park. Even though parks are virtually free (visitors pay a
nominal fee), we can add up all the money someone spends to fly their family
to Yellowstone and then rent a vehicle and pay for hotels and say all that
money spent is a lower bound

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax)

[3] [https://www.business.com/articles/pricing-and-costs-of-
pumic...](https://www.business.com/articles/pricing-and-costs-of-pumice-stone-
suppliers/)

------
adrianN
The reef is a lost cause. Corals won't survive global warming. Even if we
manage to limit warming to 1.5° a large fraction will die. Currently we're on
a 4°+ course.

~~~
barry-cotter
The reef, as currently constituted, is a lost cause, assuming neither
political nor technological solutions to global warming emerge. Genetically
engineered coral or algae is one possibility[1][2]. Another is carbon
sequestration by massive production of olivine sand weathering in the
ocean[3]. The cost of reversing anthropogenic climate change since the 1750s
are about $16 trillion, which if done over 10 years, would cost 1.7% of global
GDP.

[1][https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/coral-reef-
genetic...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/coral-reef-genetically-
engineered-climate-change-great-barrier-global-warming-a8318756.html)

[2][https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.0122...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.01220/full)

[3][https://elidourado.com/blog/dawn-of-
geoengineering/](https://elidourado.com/blog/dawn-of-geoengineering/)

~~~
achenatx
another is mutations by coral allowing them to survive in higher temperatures.

~~~
adrianN
I'd be really surprised if a significant fraction of the coral reef ecosystem
manages to get the right mutations naturally in the next few dozen
generations.

------
jellicle
Coral is a living thing. It can't live in hot(ter) water.

Additionally, the minerals will dissolve in more acidic water.

The problems of coral reefs are caused by the water becoming hotter and more
acidic. I fail to see how pumice makes the water cooler and more basic.

------
iamaelephant
Removing the word "help" from the title dramatically changes it.

~~~
bretpiatt
Had to remove 4 characters to get the title length to fit in max length, do
you have a suggested better removal?

~~~
dredmorbius
Original: "Giant Pumice Raft Floating Toward Australia Could Help Replenish
Great Barrier Reef"

84 characters.

GBR is off Australia, we can drop that. "Toward" adds little. Rearrange:

"Giant Floating Pumice Raft Could Help Replenish Great Barrier Reef"

67 characters

Since "raft" implies "floating" and "giant" is a largely superfluous
conditional (anything that might help the GBR would have to be substantive),
you could drop those for a length of 52 characters.

Headline writing / editing is an art.

------
DanBC
I really wanted to see a shot of their wake! I wanted to see how quickly it
refilled.

------
andrewstuart
This should be flagged.

Why do people let crazy ideas like this get media time?

"Giant Hamburger Headed Towards Reef Could Replenish It".

Like the thing about robot fish saving the reef, or a garbage collecting boat
clearing the plastic from the oceans.

May as well be writing about how aliens will be coming to save The Reef.

It enables climate change deniers.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
There was no need to fabricate that part of the story for it to be
interesting. It could have simply been about how freaking cool it is that the
ocean has been turned into a sea of pumice (something I didn’t know was
possible) and that someone sailed through it.

~~~
ddeck
Indeed, although in this case it seems it was not fabricated. According to the
Guardian article, the idea came from Geologist Scott Bryan:

 _Bryan said the raft will be the temporary home for billions of marine
organisms. Marine life including barnacles, corals, crabs, snails and worms
will tag along as it travels toward Australia and become a "potential
mechanism for restocking the Great Barrier Reef"._[0]

This was then more widely reported as "Scientists say..."

It appears Bryan is a geologist specializing in volcanology who has expertise
in pumice rafts, but not in marine biology[1]. One would have hoped he would
know better than to make such statements to the media.

[0]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/25/massive-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/25/massive-
pumice-raft-spotted-in-the-pacific-could-help-replenish-great-barrier-reef)

[1]
[https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/scott.bryan](https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/scott.bryan)

~~~
krisoft
I'm afraid your second link is not supporting your claim. He has expertise in
pumice rafts and their effects on marine biology. Check out "Rapid, long-
distance dispersal by pumice rafting" from him. I'm not an expert on the
topic, but seems to be a widely cited work. Do you have some reason to
disagree with his work or his conclusions?

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
But is that really going to “replenish the Great Barrier Reef?” That implies
that the reef is just waiting for seeding by organisms for it to flourish and
that is very likely not the case.

