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[h/t BeninSC]
This is pretty interesting. Until last week, I did not know that floating islands existed, but they do. Sez Wikipedia:
Sometimes referred to as tussocks, floatons, or suds, natural floating islands are composed of vegetation growing on a buoyant mat of plant roots or other organic detritus. In aquatic regions of Northwestern Europe several hundred hectares or thousand acres of floating meadows (German Schwingrasen, Dutch trilveen) have been preserved, which are partly used as agricultural land, partly as nature reserves.
They typically occur when growths of cattails, bulrush, sedge, and reeds extend outward from the shoreline of a wetland area. As the water gets deeper the roots no longer reach the bottom, so they use the oxygen in their root mass for buoyancy, and the surrounding vegetation for support to retain their top-side-up orientation. The area beneath these floating mats is exceptionally rich in aquatic lifeforms. Eventually, storm events tear whole sections free from the shore, and the islands thus formed migrate around a lake with changing winds, eventually either reattaching to a new area of the shore or breaking up in heavy weather.
In nature, floating islands are often not stable, but humans who depend on them will maintain them so that they don’t fall apart.
The island in question here, El Ojo (Eye Island) was first discovered from Google Earth photos in 2003; how long it has existed is not known. It lies in the Paraná River delta, in the Buenos Aires province of Argentina. The Paraná River is the second longest in South America, running for 4880 km (3032 miles) through three countries (Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina). The island is 120 meters (394 feet) in diameter. Unique among known floating islands, El Ojo is almost perfectly circular, and it rotates in its lake, driven by the flow of water in the river. The rotation of the island is what keeps its shape circular, as the edges are sheared whenever it makes contact with the shoreline of the lake.
Vacation destination?
Comments are below the fold.
(Alas, nothing came-in from the field tonight).
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