Thursday, April 21, 2022

Hard Hat Becomes A Barnacle Hotel

 


2 comments:

  1. I watched a man on a dredge lose his hardhat when he leaned forward. The swift current at the harbor mouth carried the hat out to sea.

    My family has collected many glass balls used as floats for fishing nets. One particular ball has quite a bit of salt water in it. I had long wondered how could that be.

    When sailing from CA to HI we came across a very large mat of barnacles. At the core of the barnacle village was the largest glass ball I had ever seen, about 4 feet diameter. The ball was large enough to keep afloat all the barnacles, although not for long.

    What happens is the sealife continues to expand on a floating object until the mass becomes so large that the weight is too great that it lowers ever deeper into the water. The mass will continue to grow until it reaches a depth where the life giving sunlight can no longer penetrate into the depths. The creatures die and shed from the float which then bobs to the surface to begin the cycle anew.

    The depth to which the mass decends is great enough that the water pressure is suffcient to force water into the float.

    I have seen the results of pressure on floats when I was in commercial fishing.

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  2. Is that Barnacle Bill the Sailor's hard hat?

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