Everything about Floating Island totally explained
A
floating island is a mass of floating aquatic plants, mud, and peat ranging in thickness from a few inches to several feet. Floating islands are a common natural phenomenon that are found in many parts of the world. They exist less commonly as a man-made phenomenon. Floating
islands are generally found on
marshlands,
lakes, and similar wetland locations, and can be many
hectares in size.
When they occur naturally they're sometimes referred to as
tussocks,
floatons, or
sudds. Natural floating islands are composed of vegetation growing on a buoyant mat consisting of plant roots or other organic detritus.
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.
Natural floating islands may have been the source of many "disappearing island"
legends, such as those surrounding the
Isle of Avalon.
Floating
artificial islands are generally made of bundled reeds, and the best known examples are those of the
Uros people of
Lake Titicaca,
Peru, who build their villages upon what are in effect huge rafts of bundled
totora reeds. The Uros originally created their islands to prevent attacks by their more aggressive neighbours, the
Incas and
Collas. The Aztec capital,
Tenochtitlan, was surrounded with
chinampas, small artificial islands used for agriculture known as "floating gardens" (though not really floating).
Spiral Island was a more modern one-person effort of constructing an artificial floating island in
Mexico.
The British wartime
Project Habakkuk proposed the construction of aircraft carriers made of ice-like
Pykrete. Its size and speed made it more an artificial iceberg or island than a ship.
Further Information
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