Imagine the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen and make it 10 times better. That’s a lot of awesomeness, right? But it still doesn’t come close to the fantastic thing one group of sailors saw while traveling through the Pacific Ocean.

On board a yacht called Maiken, the group noticed water off in the distance slowly turning brown – or so it seemed. As the yacht got closer, the crew realized that the brown patch was a large group of stones floating to the ocean’s surface.

This is not a joke. It happened.

Just imagine – one minute, you’re sailing through a seemingly endless body of water, and the next minute, your surroundings look like this.

The crew could keep going through the stone, leaving a trail behind them. Eventually, however, they had to change direction because the stone was so dense.

“I’m not sure about this, guys.”

But they did change direction, and that was a good thing. Just a few miles away, an underwater volcano was about to reveal the whole mystery.

At that point, Maiken’s crew began to understand. The giant stone they had seen earlier was actually pumice, a type of rock produced by volcanoes when they erupt.

The rock was getting bigger. They were watching the birth of an island.

According to scientists, this sort of ‘surprise island creation’ happens dozens of times each year, but it usually happens in very remote areas of the ocean.

When the eruption happened, the Maiken ship was passing through a hotspot in the Pacific Ocean.

Hotspots are places with much volcanic activity, often on the ocean floor. While ‘conventional’ volcanoes are formed where tectonic plates meet, hotspot volcanoes can occur in the middle of such a plate.

This isn’t very clear for geologists. Several theories about hotspots exist, but none are accepted by everyone.

However, geologists agree that hotspots create new volcanic islands, like the ones around Hawaii.