From the Vault: Sailor on a Sea of Lava

hot lava today? Oh? Yeah, yeah, We're definitely gonna be talking about hot lava. Um. This was This is an episode that I was inspired for us to put together because I mean, lava is always cool. Was we'll get into in a minute. They're like lava, lakes of lava, verse of lava. It pops up in a lot of our favorite uh science fiction and fantasy franchises, but of

course in the real world, it's also incredibly interesting. It's uh, it's it's there's something almost kind of holy about being either in the presence of lava or being in places where lava has recently been and standard terminology insert. The term for molten rock when it's still bottled up below the Earth's surface is magma, and the exact same stuff is called lava once it breaches the surface in an eruption.

So if it's on the surface of the Earth, basically, if you're looking at it, if you're watching it form a river across the black fields of rock, it is now lava. Right, yes, Now, I recently had the privilege this just was just last week actually, um, just a little over a week ago. I had the privilege of getting to hike the Kilauea Ekey Trail in Volcano National Park in Hawaii with my family and with some friends. Uh. This is a that I've done twenty years ago and

I always wanted to do again. I always wanted to you know, be able to bring my my wife on the trip, and then you know, bring my son on the trip. And Uh, if anyone out there is considering going to the island of Hawaii, I highly recommend this particular walk. It's it's very popular. It's not not a trade secret or anything. It's a three point three mile loop. It takes you around down and then straight across Kilauea Ekey Crater. Uh today just just like you know it

was twenty years ago. It's this beautiful landscape of black cracked volcanic terrain um with with vegetation, uh, you know at the top. So the hike itself gives you this this wonderful transformation. You get to walk through almost this kind of rainforest setting. Uh. Then you you know, you go down uh the edge of the crater, and then you go into the bottom of the crater where it's like another planet. It's it's truly unlike anywhere else I've been,

just a really unique and beautiful place. One of the things I remember that we talked about in our episodes on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was about how you can track sort of the length of time since the last eruption or or major disturbance by how far vegetation has re encroached on the on the volcano, and that you know, so there was this horrible eruption in what was of Vesuvius, and it turned the area around there into I'm sure you know, eliminated most life within a

certain radius from the from the eruption site. But then you get to see just like over the years, the trees and all the vegetation just pours back in the

greening of the of the cone. And there's something I always found beautiful about that because it's like the trees don't know ya, the tree that it's it's always it's It's kind of interesting in both directions because you see footage of of of the volcanic activity that took place in this crater back in and you know, you see the plant the are just hanging out that they don't you know, they don't care. They're like, I don't know.

I'm still doing Okay, I haven't been the leaves have not been burnt from me yet, so you will sue me in the foreground. And then likewise, you go back there today and you see the you know, the plants making their comeback, um, right at the fissure point, right at the place where where all of this volcanic activity was was happening, where this lava fountain was shooting high into the sky. It's beautiful. Yeah. So, like I said, if you go to two Ikey Crater today Kilauea Ekey Crater,

you can you can walk across it. Uh, you know, all perfectly safe. Um. The lava that was underneath your feet, it's all completely solid now, we're thought to be. Probably has been completely solid since the I think the mid nineties, they say. But but all this was different in the past. Hawaii is, of course a young island formed from five separate shield volcanoes. If you were to travel back in time a million years, the island wouldn't be there at all.

Travel back to the mid nineteen fifties, and this particular crater was there, but it contained an entire forest at the bottom of it. Um, and this would have been roughly eight hundred feet or two hundred and forty four meters down into the crater. But then in nineteen fifty nine, Uh, there was this, uh, this eruption event, spectacular eruption from

a half mile fissure in the crater wall. And then in seventeen separate episodes, lava gushed from this event, lasting five weeks total, flooding the crater, with lava halfway up that eight hundred foot crater wall, so forming the the iconic set piece of many wonderful movies and video games, especially to the Lake of Lava. That's right, um, And there's some stunning images of this uh um I included one in our notes here, Joe. These just come from

the UH from MPs dot gov. You can you can look up all sorts of information there about the eruption and of Kilauea ekey. Uh. There's some great photography. Uh. There's also some wonderful footage if you go on YouTube and you look for the eruption of Kilawaa nine nineteen sixty.

This is like a wonderfully old school documentary piece about uh, this event with all sorts of just glorious unreal footage of of of you know, churning lava, spewing lava fountains and so forth, which is wonderful to watch either before or after you, you know, physically visit the crater. I also love the dragnet style department of interior seal that

appears right at the beginning. Yeah, and the the narrator reminds me of the narrator from a lot of the old Walt Disney Goofy shorts, where like Goofy is doing different sports, so you expect Goofy to show up at some point as a volcanologist, but he does not. Gorsh that would shore your bones. So anyway, this is a spectacular event. A fountain of lava shot her feet into the air, dropping gouts of magna at times the size

of bathtubs. Are described as being the size of bathtubs, and the resulting lake a lava was was most impressive. I've seen it described in park literature as a quote churning lava lake. Eventually enough lava filled the crater that the crack was covered up. Then the molten lava drain back into the vent at a speed four times faster than it filled. Uh. The National Park Service describes this occurrence as quote a noisy whirlpool of red hot liquid

lava and black slabs of solid rock metal. Yeah. I mean, it didn't get any more metal than this. Um. And there's actually footage in that video I mentioned where you get to see a shot of a of a lava of vortex um and it's it's it's pretty it's pretty impressive. So even though if you visit this particular location today you don't get to um, you know, you don't get to see this this impressive lake of lava any greater you can you can imagine it, like the endscape still

speaks of it. Uh, the landscape looks like the top of of of of a sheet of brownies, you know, that is cooled and has therefore um um, you know broken as it's kind of collapsed, because that's essentially what happened with the with the lake of lava as this uh,

as the surface drops down and cracks open. Uh, it's it's just a wonderful, dynamic landscape that that not only I mean, on one level it feels like a place that is not Earth, But on another level, it's like it's this wonderful almost holy insight into like just how dynamic the planet is and how alive our planet is.

Now to sort of get to the point of the episode, though, I guess, yeah, the idea of a lake of lava, a sea of lava, or you know, certainly think of any footage you've you've seen of lava flows when when rock becomes more or less like a liquid, we can't help but imagine the fantastic possibility these right ships, uh, sailing on a sea of lava, boats riding rivers of fire, cartoon characters surfing down lava on some sort of fantastic surfboard.

I think one of the most um you know, obvious and perhaps outrageous examples that I can think too comes from the first season of The Mandalorian, the Star Wars television series, in which we see our heroes ride a droid piloted barge down a subterranean canal of lava, which I think is also supposed to be part of like the sewage system. I'm not sure exactly how this uh, how this planet um is really using. It's it's lava here, but it's it's a fun it's a fun steam like

within the fantasy of the show. It's it's really cool. It's very you know, it's very hellish. It's kind of like, uh, you know, the river sticks meets lava and and and here's here's some sort of a ridiculous droid, you know, in the in the back of the barge pushing it along. Um. And then I guess this sort of thing happens in a lot of video game So I'm thinking, like, surely

this happens in Mario, right, Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. In Super Mario sixty four there's there's at least a couple of levels with things floating around in lava, and the one for the Super Nintendo I think also when you get towards the end, closer to Bowser's palace, there's there's stuff floating around in lava a lot. Yeah, it just makes sense. You gotta have your you gotta have your lava levels, and just about any video game it's bad

guy stuff. Yeah, it's bad guys, say. I mean, you look at other movies where where does the bad guy build his layer? And it's in a volcano of course? Right. Um. We even talked about one recently on Weird House Cinema. There was the Hercules movie where we had we had the villain using a hideout in a volcano, and of course the final showdown takes place within the volcano over a lake of lava. Oh yeah, what was the funny

thing about the sword there or something? Oh, there were multiple funny things going on, but yeah, that they had that was where the rainbow sword, well, you know he had a rainbow sword, and then there was the sword that had that was holding the phoenix in place. There was a lot going on in that particular volcanic layer. Now I was looking around for other examples of this sort of trope. I went to TV tropes dot com, which is always a fun place to bruise this sort

of thing. I was reminded that. Um, in The Hobbit The Desolation of Smog, this being the second Hobbit film from Peter Jackson, there's a scene where Thorn rides a wheelbarrow on molten gold, um, you know, sort of surfing in it. I I had completely forgotten about this whole this whole sequence in the movie where they add this bit where they try to defeed the dragon by uh covering him with molten gold. Oh, I don't remember that either.

I did see that movie somehow. Yeah, I just saw it last year and I kind of blanked out on all this. But then after I read about it, like, okay, I vaguely remember that because it's kind of a pretty scene where the dragon gets covered in gold, but then it cracks the gold and he's free from the gold. They ripped that straight out of the end of Alien three, that's right. Yeah, what did they cover liquid lad or something? Yeah? Yeah, it's the lead works and they cover the alien and

I guess it's lead. It's some kind of molten metal, and then you think it's dead, but then it just jumps out. Oh yeah, it certainly wasn't in the book. I don't remember that in the Hobbit novel at all. No. Well, I also don't remember in the Hobbit novel. In the novel, did they like ride barrels down the river? Is that in there? Yeah, they did ride barrels. I do remember

the barrel the row where they wrote in barrels. They were kind of I think everybody was ever the bilbo was like sealed up, and then I think they were all, you know, pretty seasick in there. But um, but I do remember that happening now. I also read on TV Tropes that there's a there's a book in the Culture series by an In Banks, so I look to Windward, which is what I have, but I haven't read yet.

It's apparently mentioned that lava rafting is an extreme sport that citizens of the Culture participate in on unfinished habitats. So it sounds that sounds on brand with the sort of thing that people of the culture would do. It's

a moderately extreme sport. Yeah, yeah. Now. Thing that's worth pointing out about about these examples and plenty of other examples, is that very often, whether you're playing a video game or watching a movie, you find something kind of interesting about molten lava in in fiction, molten lava only seems dangerous if you come into physical contact with it. So if you fall into it or um or it's poured over you that sort of resinc you know, into the

lake of lava, then you're doomed. But if you're just standing next to it or in close proximity to it, you're fine, which of course would not be the case because lava is extremely hot, as we'll get into in this episode. Yeah, that is funny. Is so they treated as like it's like Hollywood acid. It's as if it only harms you by direct contact chemical reaction. But of course, you know, a real lake of lava or river flowing molten lava that would be so hot that it is

superheating the air directly above it. So like that would be you know, being above a lake of lava. I don't know exactly how hot it would be, but it would be to some extent like getting right next to a heating element of a broiler. Yeah, yeah, we're talking pretty hot, and we'll bust out some temperatures here in

a bit. But it's it's a fire guy from sort of the floor is lava scenario, whether you're talking about the Netflix game show or just the good old fashioned childhood version of this where the floor is now we're imagining it is lava, and you can as long as you don't touch it, you're fine. If you make the jump from from the love seat to the couch without touching the floor, then you're fine. I think the more if you want to play the same game, but you want it to be more accurate, it should be like

the floor is spikes. There you go, you know, like spikes. They don't hurt you unless you actually like get on them and put your weight on them. What kind of gory kids are playing the floor is spikes? Though, you know somehow it's worse. It's worse. I want my kids imagining wholesome charring down to the bone, complete just incineration of their flesh turning into a puff of carbon that goes up into the air. You know. One of the weird things about this is that I know that Flora's

Lava is the most popular of the childhood games. Did you play Flora's Lava as a child? Oh? Absolutely, I mean I don't know if most often we said it was lava or we said that it was like, you know, swamp water with alligators in it or or whatever. But we definitely played the games of can't touch the floor, got to stay on the furniture because it is some kind of hazard. See, we would often do and I have no idea where we got this. We would do

the floor as a never ending pit. And I'm not sure where we got the idea of a never ending pit from. I'm trying to think back on, well, what what would I have been watching at the time, Like what movies had a never ending pit in them? And I don't really remember what specifically we could be referring to their this the version of the game played by a philosopher's child, you know, the real threat to them is that they'll fall forever and be a left alone

with their thoughts. Well, I would think about this. Maybe it had something, you know, maybe it had something to do with the Masters of the Universe movie where there's like a never ending it underneath Eternia, or it's supposed to be never ending pit. I don't know, even though if they describe it as such, or maybe I just had this idea of a never ending pit in my head and just assume that that's what it was. You know,

we're really getting on a tangent. But I will say I think a lot of the terror of the idea of a bottomless pit comes at the idea of people imagining the very beginning of a fall, where you're accelerating towards terminal velocity, and it's that feeling if you're going faster and faster as you fall down, and it's really scary, but actually pretty quickly you hit terminal velocity and then you would you would basically equalize, so the acceleration stops,

and then you're just floating in the air forever. So it is like a it is like a sensory deprivation tank that you just get to stay in for for

the rest of your life. Well, anyway, we should keep going on this, but uh, but I thought that this all might be a good place to jump off and talk about the idea of lava boats, both in terms of what we might loosely think of as actual lava boats, and we'll break that down a little bit, but we'll also even get into some considerations of what could be stable if you were just really insistent on on creating a human constructed vessel that can withstand a lake of lava. Well,

how might you go about that? We'll get into that as well. Thank thank now, Rob. I know that what you have in mind when you say a lava boat is what we're talking about, is a boat that can float on lava. But my brain went in a different direction with this, which was not a boat floating in lava, but a boat made of lava or more specifically, of a type of volcanic rock known as pummice. Will you

go on this strange journey with me? Oh? Yeah, I mean, when you decided to do a whole episode about lava boats, you take what you can get. This is kind of this is kind of the This American Life, um uh principle of podcasting. You know, you know an American and This American Life. You know, they're gonna have a certain theme and not every segment of the episode is going to really match up one with whatever that theme happens to be. But but you know, it's a it's a

guiding principle for the episode. Well, I think this one puts us in places that are that are just as awesome and weird as looking at the lake of lava and imagining floating on it. Let's do it. Let's go there. Okay. So pummice is a very unique and interesting rock which has the strange distinction of being so low in density that it can often actually float on the surface of water. If you you may have observed this yourself, if you ever had like a pumice stone in the bathtub or something.

But if you've never seen this, you can look up plenty of video. It exists all over the internet, or you can even try it for yourself. You can get a handful of pumice stones, throw them into a bathtub or you know, tub of water, sink full of water, and there's a very good chance that they will float like styrofoam, though you may get some duds. I think not all pumice stones float, but a lot do. Now quite famously, almost all rocks sink in water. So how

why is this one different? How does this rock end up being the one that is able to float on the water surface. Well, pummice is a type of igneous rock, igneous meaning formed in fire. So this is a rock that's usually a byproduct of violent or explosive volcanic eruptions.

And I say violent or explosive as opposed to the slower, more gentle volcanic eruptions that you would typically see producing the things we've been talking about, you know, the rivers of molten lava on the surface, or the stuff you'd

see in the famous lava lake footage from Hawaii. A lot of the Hawaiian eruptions we we picture are are the more gentle types of eruptions, but more explosive or violent volcanic eruptions, which those are the ones you'll typically see producing more of a kind of uh an ash cloud like a column rising into the sky. Very sudden eruptions um that these are more likely to release a

lot of pummice. I think. Another characteristic of pumice forming eruptions is that they tend to happen in places where the magma is richer in silica, which tends to make it more viscous. So you can think about the different kinds of magma here. The magma that leads to a highly pumus forming eruption is usually going to be thicker or stickier magma. But how does it turn into a rock that can float? So if you imagine molten rock trapped underneath the Earth's surface. This magma down there is

actually not just composed of melted rock. It also contains various fluids in solution, so it might contain dissolved water, vapor or c O two sometimes I think sulfur dioxide, and these gases are are all kept dissolved in the magma because the magma is under very high pressure. It's

underneath the ground. So you can think about the way that the CEO two dissolved in a carbonated beverage stays in solution until the can or the bottle is opened, and then the release of pressure allows some of that CEO too to start coming out of solution, turning back into gas, and to start, you know, it starts floating to the top of the drink in the form of bubbles. That's because you have undone the pressure of the closed container.

And it turns out that the process leading to the formation of pum us during a volcanic eruption is actually pretty similar to what happens when you open a carbonated beverage, except it involves an extra step, which is sort of

the freezing of that that frothing foamy product. So the process goes like this, You've got magma trapped beneath the earth surface, and it's got all this gas dissolved in it, and the gas again is kept in solution by high pressure, and then there is a volcanic eruption in effect that the soda can is opened. The magma rushes to the

surface where there is rapid de pressure ization. And now because the pressure is lower, the dissolved CO two and water and other gases they bolt from solution and they start wanting to turn turn into gas, forming into bubbles. But at the very same time that the pressure is relieved and the gas wants to come out of solution and turn into bubbles, the magma is also cooling really rapidly. In effect, it is freezing the rock in place, and so what you end up with is a rock that

is filled with what geologists called vesicles. These are little bubbles and hollows created by the depressurized gases that are sort of locked into crystal and form because the rock was cooling rapidly at the same time that all these bubbles were forming, and what you get is a rock that's sort of the rock equivalent of if you took

the foamy head of a beer and froze it. Yeah, and you know this is this is something you can actually if you were to pick up various lava rocks, you'll find that they are lighter than you might think for this very reason because they have all of these little little hollow pockets in them. Uh, you know, there

were essentially, you know, little pockets of gas. Yes, though, though of course you can end up with very different kinds of lava rock, but a lot of them are like this, Yeah, that they they've got this this lower density than other types of rock, I think, But it depends on a lot of It depends on like the composition of the magma, the conditions under which the lava cooled once it was on the surface, and things like that. So so you can end up with a lot of

different products. But pummice is one of these, and pummice is is very low density. So you can end up with this very low density rock that it's that's full of these little vesicles that allow it to float on the surface of the water. Uh though though I do think over time pummice tends to get water logged and lose its buoyancy, but that can take a long time. So you can get a pummice rock that you know, it remains buoyant for for years after after the time

it's created. But anyway, coming back around to the idea of lava boats, I think the really amazing thing about the ability of pummice to float is that when large masses of pumice are all formed together, they can all float together, leading to a phenomenon known as pummice rafts. So, as one example of this, I was looking at a BBC article from twenty nineteen called vast pummice raft found drifting through Pacific Ocean. Yeah, this is really encreidly and

includes footage that is also quite quite fascinating. Oh yeah, well we'll get to that in a second. So in August of twenty nineteen, there were some Australian sailors that reported the discovery of a gigantic raft of floating pumice

stones in the Pacific Ocean. This was out on the open sea east of Fiji, and the story is that it was a couple of Australian sailors who were traveling between islands in a catamaran and they accidentally piloted into this field of floating stones in the middle of the night. So I think that they didn't see what they were getting into, but then they realized something was up, and the the raft of stones apparently slowed the vessel down and greatly reduced the wave action on the surface of

the water. And the sailors investigated. They looked out in the moonlight and they shine their spotlight to try to see what was going on, and saw this rock field in the water that extended as far as they could see. And at first the pummice jammed their rudder, so it made it hard for them to steer, and they thought they might be stuck, but eventually they were able to

get out of the raft zone. And when you hear the dimensions of this thing, and especially when you see what a giant pumice raft looks like, you can imagine how strange and frightening of an experience this might have been.

So at the time of the article, it was estimated that this pummice raft was about a hundred and fifty square kilometers or fifty eight square miles, which the article says is roughly equivalent to twenty thousand football fields, though this is BBC, so I think that is what we would we would call soccer not football, well, it's still

soccer fields and amazing. I was looking up countries by land area for comparison, and so this raft would indeed be larger than a bunch of the world's smallest countries. It's roughly the same area as the British Virgin Islands or Liechtenstein. But there are various videos you can look up taken from people on boats who have gotten into one of these rafts, and by the way, that is not recommended. Multiple sources I was looking at were saying that sailing into a pumus raft area can be dangerous

and advising people not to try it. But people had taken video of this, and it's almost too weird to describe. One video I found that was, you know, relinked all over the internet. It looks like the ship is sitting in an enormous desert or gravel parking lot, except the parking lot extends all the way to the horizon and it is undulating with way is like the ocean, because

it is the ocean. Just absolutely hallucinogenic apocalyptic imagery. If you can just imagine a moving, rippling parking lot that goes as far as you can see. Yeah, I mean it's almost it's like they sailed into a tool video or something. It's and it does seem to stretch to the horizon. It's just yeah, it's like it's it's if you can imagine the sun coming up and you find yourself in this boat on such a sea. It's like

something out of a rhyme of the ancient mariner. Oh totally like, yeah, you just want to get out of here. Unhand me, gray Beard loon um. But according to this BBC report, the geoscientists that they consulted said that the pumics raft discovered in August nineteen was probably created by the eruption of an underwater volcano near Tonga earlier that month, and the rocks in this raft very greatly in size. A lot of them appear to be sort of marble or pebble sized, but others are big, you know, the

size of basketballs. And another weird thing is that this is apparently not even that unusual. The article sites a professor named Scott Brian of the Queensland University of Technology saying that big pummice rafts like this appear roughly once every five years or so in the area due to volcanic eruptions, and he interestingly links pumice rafts to historical reports of islands in the ocean that people spot on one journey but then later say they can't find again

when they returned to the same place. So possibly some of these observations were actually not land but floating rafts of low density rock. That's fascinating because we we've discussed on past in past episodes about how various mirages and optical effects can can lead to the miss identification of of islands where there are no islands. But but here's another possibility, at least for for some reasons of the world right especially in the Pacific, and like these these

volcanic chain areas. Now, these rafts don't last forever. They disintegrate over time. They probably break up into smaller and smaller clusters and then end up either sinking or being deposited on shores. But yeah, it's a truly stunning active planet Earth to to see these things. And I know what you're all wondering, And I know you're thinking, Okay, since we're on the subject of lava boats, you're thinking, could a pumice raft function as an actual raft function?

As a boat for me, Like could I walk on it? Could I travel on it? And I think generally like that would be the It seems like they're the perfect scenario, right right, So from everything I can tell, the answer to this is almost always no. I did find a few pictures of scientists, uh the sort of appearing to trudge around on a pumice raft and what looks like very shallow water, but I couldn't tell what was going on. There may be some kind of special all condition involved

in this one scenario. In general, I think most pumus rafts will no more support your weight than would a floating clump of cheetos on the surface of a swimming pool. It's just like you just go right through it, So don't try it. I think what would really be necessary in order for it to support you would be some way for it to like all be held together into a single mass. But this is like, you know, it's like floating packing peanuts. It's just like there's nothing to

like form a solid floor for you. Yeah, you'd have to somehow like like lash it all together, I guess, right, Yeah, And well, even if you were able to do that, I might worry that it's not rigid enough, so like it could turn into like a death trap, Like you just jump into a tarp that's on the water surface and it closes around you. Yeah, that sounds that sounds horrifying. But but but just because the raft won't support anything the size and density of a human being doesn't mean

that these don't carry other biological passengers. And in fact, there is plenty of evidence that pumice rafts do exactly that, that they may serve as a fast dispersal mechanism for many kinds of smaller life forms, especially marine life spreading between different zones of the ocean and UH from coastal regions to other coastal regions, sort of island to island, for example, I was looking at one paper by Brian

at All. I think this is actually Scott Bryan, the same researcher who was cited in that BBC article, but a bunch of other authors published in pl Os one in called rapid long distance dispersal by pumice rafting. And here the author's note that actually pumice rafts make a wonderful agent for transporting a big variety of marine organisms from one place to another. UH for a number of reasons.

I mean, they've got these little vesicles in them, all, these little hollows and holes and bubbles which make a great place for tiny organisms and larvae of larger organisms to hide from predators while they're being transported across the water.

But anyway, they write, quote here we report on a significant recent pummice rafting and long distance dispersal event that occurred across the Southwest Pacific following the two thousand and six explosive eruption of home Reef volcano in Tonga uh And they say, according to their their research, they found more than eighty species and a substantial biomass underwent a more than five thousand kilometer journey in seven to eight

months by by way of this pummice raft. And so that they include like some photos of pieces of pumice salvaged from from some of these floating rafts. And it's funny how much life that they're just coated with by the end. Like, so they have these photos where they identify all the different life forms that are clinging to these floating rocks. They've got braz Owen's anemones, mollusks, goose, barnacles, corals, cyanobacteria, macro algae, uh, some other things. I don't even know

how to pronounce it. Like these can become sort of these these rafts of life going from place to place. Yeah, these are these are impressive, Like all this just a created life on the rock. And I found another interesting relationship. This one just hypothetical, I mean the previous Like, it is clear that these pumice rafts actually do harbor plenty of life forms and transport them around in the ocean.

But another interesting hypothesis is that floating rafts of pumice could possibly have been a good environment for the the origins of life on Earth. This has argued, for example, in a paper I was looking at from the journal Astrobiology by Martin D. Brazier. At all Brazier, I think, is a professor at Oxford University, and the paper is called pummics as a Remarkable substrate for the origin of life.

And essentially the authors here argue that floating rafts of pumice actually meet a lot of the criteria that we would expect for the place for life to first evolve on Earth. Uh. They give a number of reasons, they say, uh, related to the physical properties of pummis itself. So just reading from their abstract, they give four reasons. They say, first, during eruption, it develops the highest surface area to volume

ratio for any rock type. Second, it is the only known rock type that floats as rafts on the air water interface and then becomes beached in the title zone for long periods of time. Third, it is exposed to an unusually wide variety of conditions, including dehydration. Finally, from rafting to burial, it has a remarkable ability to add sorb metals, organics, and phosphates, as well as to host

organic catalysts such as zeolites and titanium oxides. And then they say these remarkable properties now deserve to be rigorously

explored in the laboratory and the early rock record. So this would sort of match with some of the other interesting ideas we've talked about how um a lot of research trus are thinking good candidate areas for the origins of life on Earth would be like areas that repeatedly got wet and dry in cycles, or areas that were right at the interface of water and dry land, because that that kind of change like hydration and dehydration of of sort of gatherings of organic molecules could have triggered

some of the chemical evolution that gave rise to you know, the organic molecules you're looking for for the origins of life and possibly for the structural formations of cells themselves. Yeah, and if and if this, if this were the case too, this would be another example of volcanoes being both you know,

creator and destroyer. You know, known for their they're very destructive properties, but also we have numerous examples of how they bring new things into being being be at the creation of of whole island chains or uh, you know, creating more land on existing volcanic islands, or are just creating fertile soil from which you know, all sorts of of plants can grow totally. Yeah, So anyway, I like

this idea. Maybe in the future will come back to more more of the relationship or the possible relationship between pumus and the origins of life than now. Another example of of what we might call lava boats or or lava rafts are sometimes referred to as such. Uh, you can also find in the in the real world. Um and there's there's actually some fabulous footage of this of this phenomenon that that came out in in recent years, UM, particularly in regard to two thousand eighteen UH volcanic activity

at Kilauea. UH. What we're talking about here with lava both lava rafts are simply a created lava masses that move downstream and lava flows. They look sort of like rafts or boats, um. And as they move more lava can adhere to them, and they accreed into bigger lava balls. And to be clear, the official terminology here is not lava boats or lava rafts, it is lava balls or

accretionary balls. But lava boats kind of took social media by storm, especially uh in regard to some of the footage that was making the rounds, which is quite impressive. It looks like this big black sort of star destroyer type shape in the lava flow making its way sort of towards the camera. You're wanting to recreate your Revenge

of the Sixth scene, this is exactly what you're looking for. Yeah, or you can you can imagine like a burning skeleton like jamming on a metal guitar like this standing on top of this thing. It's it's very impressive. It should have its own due warrior. Yeah, so this is this is awesome footage. You know, definitely try to look it

up if you're you're interested. And it also can help sort of illustrate what sometimes we sometimes encounter with off of fields in which an upper rigid crust rests or you could even say, floats on a layer of fluid lava. But this would be, you know, an even more stark example of that of that that situation. Now, from here I thought we might move on into the discussion of sort of I guess speculative lava boats and you you

mean boats more literally? Now, yes, Now we're getting into the idea of like a a vessel that humans made, and in this case, that humans make and then like set adrift in a lake of lava and then attempt to climb into said vessel and maybe make a voyage halfway across the lake take me there, Yeah, perhaps to defeat Bowser or something. I don't know. But so, if you haven't watched the two thousand sixteen documentary Into the Inferno, I think we we we both would highly recommend this.

It's It was written and directed by Werner Herzog and featured British volcanologists Clive Oppenheimer. Both of these gentlemen were guests on our show back and I believe this was like late in promotion of their documentary Fireball Visitors from Darker Worlds. I think UH Into the Inferno was the documentary they had done right before this one, right, Yeah, dealing with with the volcanoes, and Uh, it's it's it's wonderful.

If you get a chance to watch it, you definitely should if you're interested in volcanoes or you know it's the work of Werner Herzog. Uh, you know, definitely worth picking picking up. UM Into the Inferno features footage of volcanologist Maurice and Kadia Kraft Uh French husband and wife duo. The Crafts were pioneers in the film documentation of volcanoes, notable for there's sometimes very you know, close proximity UM filming of lava flows, a lot of very dangerous at

times looking footage. Uh and Saturday they did both perish

in a pyroclastic flow on mountains and in Japan. But these were the where there was a couple that that loved volcanoes and I was reading a little bit about them in Fire in the Earth, Fire and the Soul The Final Moments of Maurice and Catia Kraft by John Calderazzo, published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment In and In this the author notes the following quote, and this is speaking of Maurice here he loved to say how fantastic it would be to one day build a special boat,

a kind of titanium arc, to put in on a lava flow off. They'd ride down a steaming mountain, flying the French flag and waving to all their friends as they rode a glowing river into the sea. Well, on one hand, that's beautiful, but I'm also amused by the the addition of the French flag. Well you know they were French, why not. But now I don't think we're supposed to to take this claim this lava for France.

Um legan is. You've got to get on. It's literally getting out on the ground floor of new uh of of of New Land. Now, I don't think we're meant to take this, you know, real seriously, these were two individuals who simply loved volcanoes, loved volcanic activity. They lived for volcanoes. Uh Caldaraso quotes them is saying that volcanoes were like are like blind wild animals that one must observe, like a quote mad witch doctor. I think the idea

is like it's it's got indigestion. You need to watch it for a very long time to see what what's what's going on with it? Um. They also talked about how normal mountains are dead and that they prefer the

living mountains of volcanoes. When you love volcanoes so much, you have to slag normal mountains, right, So, you know, I think it's safe to, you know, to say that they could just be you know, they're being a little poetic, like we love volcanoes so much that if we could ride a ship on the on the floor of lava, we would. But at the same time, it's still a terrific vision. Uh you know, this high tech vessel sailing

across lava. I was looking around. I imagine somebody has has explored this more in science fiction, especially like pulp science fiction of the old days, Like there has to be some story about like a uh, you know, a volcanic planet and there being some sort of a volcanic ship. I would be shocked if this is not shown, if this nes not appeared in uh in Doctor Who at some point or another. So so if if you're wondering, well,

could could this exist? Could we make something like this? Well? Luckily, volcanologist and science writer Robin Andrews chimed in on this very topic for a seventeen Forbes dot Com article titled Here's how to make a boat to sail over deadly lava and and he he uses, uh, the dreams of the crafts of particularly Maurice Craft is kind of the jumping off point for this as well. Okay, what's his

plan here? Okay? So um, he points out, there's, first of all, you've got to take into account those temperatures like like first and foremost. They may ignore the temperatures

in the movies, but you need to be aware of them. Uh. First of all, he writes that lava flows tend to run one thousand degrees celsius or one thousand, eight hundred thirty two degrees fahrenheit on average, and lava lakes can exceed that to a max of of of of somewhere around eleven hundred degrees celsius or two thousand and twelve degrees fahrenheit. So it's it's really hot. You can if you're gonna be anywhere anywhere close to that, for certainly

for a boat ride. If you're gonna build a boat, you have to take into account that, um, it's gonna be that hot. You're gonna need physical protection. You're also going to need some sort of containment suit or uh, you know, oxygen just supply so that you're not just breathing in toxic gases that are either going to kill you dead out there on the lake or just like

permanently damage your body. So he says, Okay, if you're gonna build this boat, it probably needs to be steel, as steel melts at one thousand, three hundred and seventy degrees celsius or two thousand, five hundred degrees fahrenheit. So you know, you don't want to be in a boat that melts in the lava lake. You want to be in a boat that that doesn't quite melt and that almost melt. Yes, by the way, so some of this

may may sound from like familiar territory. Of of course, we did an episode on the One Ring from from The Lord of the Rings discussing just what sort of metal would melt or be destroyed in Mount Doom, but would not melt or be destroyed in a medieval forge. So if you want more metallurgy, uh, that's that's episode to go back to. Okay, all right, but going back here to the work of Robin Andrews. Next, he points out that you need an interior lining in that boat

that's non flammable and also highly heat resistant. Otherwise the boat which is simply cook you. I think you your your skin would stick to it, which is which sounds horrifying. Yeah, even if the boat didn't melt, it would essentially turn into a frying pan, right in a frying pan on

the heating element. Yes, So he writes the following about possible lining options here quote, there are a variety of plastics you can use, and if you aren't worried about fire started by rogue lava blebs, you could even use wet wood. If you want to be particularly high tech, grab some halfnium carbide with a melting point of around four thousand degrees celsius seven thousand two fahrenheit and very high thermal resistance. These would ensure you don't get a

little sizzled inside your boat. You could even use halfneum carbide to make the boat, but seeing as it's unfathomably expensive, steals a far cheaper option here, just looked it up. Half ne um carbide is said to have a melting point of thirty degrees celsius, So you're really good to go there. Yeah, And he also mentioned that you'd probably need to paddle with similar material. You know you'd have you'd have to make your paddle or your your your pole out of that as well. I guess it depends

on how ambitious you are. You're just happy to be floating um on or down the you know, the lake or flow of lava, or do you do you feel like you need to actually build up speed? Where do you end up? Does this mean you just ride this thing until it dumps you out into the ocean? Um? Well,

I guess it depends. I mean, if you're just in a lake of of of lava, like in a crater like um Kilauea ekey, then you might just be floating out there until the like the vortex sucks you down or until or if it's if there's a fountain of of lava going on, until like that burns you up or or drops a bunch of bathtub sized blobs of lava on top of you. Or yeah, it's a flow going into the ocean. Maybe you ride that out, but that's gonna be there. There's gonna be some rapids in there. Well.

Another hazard we haven't even mentioned yet is that if you actually do ride this all the way down to the water's edge and then you plunge into the water where the molten lava is hitting the water, Uh, you need to be careful there because another totally separate thing I was reading about that we haven't even gotten to yet is this stuff called lace. If you you've read about this rub the so called lava haze, no, no,

tell me about the lace. Well, unfortunately this has actually led to at least a few human deaths in the past. But it's this type of steam or haze or mist that billows up when molten lava falls into the ocean. I think I was reading about it directly in connection with Kilauea. Actually it's dangerous for multiple reasons. Number One that these clouds, because of some kind of chemical reaction

that happens, the clouds are full of hydrochloric acid. It's like stomach acid, which you don't want getting into your lungs. But I think it may also have, like other types of highly corrosive acids, hydrofluoric acid of course, lots of carbon dioxide. But then the another part is that it's full of tons of extremely tiny little shards of volcanic glass that get carried up in the steam. So basically,

you don't want to get anywhere near this stuff. If you ever see lava dripping into the water, it's beautiful to observe from a distance, but you don't want to go near it. So if you're listening to this episode and you're you're if you're thinking, well, I could do this, I could pull this up. No, do not, Please do not attempt this at home, or or or in Volcano National Park, or anywhere near any volcano you have you

happen to be visiting. Please keep a respectful distance. And that's just respecting yourself, right right though, certainly, if you have a chance to to to get within a safe distance of any kind of volcano activity, to visit Volcano National Park or really any any volcanic location, definitely check it out. I mean, these these are the living mountains.

These are these are amazing places. And even if you're visiting a place that's not quite alive anymore, uh, you know, sort of recently dead mountains like that alone haunted by a particular energy that you just don't necessarily encounter it uh in in other parts of the world totally. But

obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Um, have you visited some volcanic locations and you have a aditional sightings you would like to share if you seen anything, uh, you know, like these these the floating pummis or these uh or these these lava balls. Uh, let us know, you know, what are some volcanic terrains that you've explored, and likewise, what are some volcanic situations you've explored in fantasy and fiction that match up with what we've been

talking about. What are we missing out there in the world the why the wide wild world of sci fi exploration? If there are some some tremendous scenes of ships sailing on a sea of lava and so forth, right in and let us know we'd love to hear from you. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, to tell us

about your lavabout fantasies, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.