A team of scientists from five different countries are about to embark on a voyage to a huge underwater volcano that has been producing tonnes of pumice stone which has washed up on beaches in Australia and New Zealand.

The volcano was located by chance in 2012 when an airline passenger identified huge amounts of the light pumice rock floating in the ocean.

Since its discovery researchers have been monitoring it remotely using satellites and aircraft.

But vulcanologist Dr Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania is one of the researchers who will get a closer look at the volcano during a sea voyage.

"Since March 2014 we've had reports all across the state of volcanic pumice arriving on beaches," she said.

"So the community have engaged us in basically trying to explain where this pumice is coming from, because there's been massive amounts arriving on Flinders Island and the east coast of Tasmania.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 3 minutes 34 seconds 3 m 34 s Pumice washing up on Australian beaches from underwater volcano ( Felicity Ogilvie ) Download 6.5 MB

"We actually know where this volcanic pumice has come from, because we know the source of the eruption and it arrived on the east coast of Australia about a year earlier.

"The source of the pumice is a volcano in the Kermadec arc, which is about 1,000 kilometres north of New Zealand."

Volcano would never have been found without tip-off

Steam and smoke are seen rising from the ocean near huge pumice rafts shortly after the discovery of Havre Volcano in 2012. ( NASA Earth Observatory )

Dr Carey said she was not sure how much pumice had washed up on Australian beaches but the volcano had produced a phenomenal amount of it.

"We know that this eruption produced about a cubic kilometre of pumice, so that's an extraordinarily huge amount and probably up to a third of that got dispersed around the Pacific Ocean," she said.

Dr Rebecca Carey is embarking on a scientific mission to study the underwater volcano which has been dumping tonnes of pumice in the Pacific Ocean. ( Supplied )

"We're talking probably thousands to tens of thousands of tonnes of pumice across the Australian east coast."

She said it was known as Havre Volcano and it was a one-in-10,000-year event.

"Havre probably has an eruption frequency of maybe one of these type of eruptions every 10,000 years, so it's just our luck I guess that it erupted and we saw satellite images and we've also got pumice," she said.

Dr Carey said researchers were only tipped off to the volcano's presence after a chance sighting by a airline passenger.

"The first knowledge we had was from a passenger of an airline jet who looked out of her window and saw these rafts of volcanic pumice and for some reason, she knew exactly what they were, so she contacted the Geological Survey of New Zealand who then contacted us and said we think there's been an eruption in this area and we were able to access some satellite imagery and backtrack the source of the pumice raft," she said.

"Seventy-five per cent of Earth's volcanos are actually on the sea floor and they provide heat and chemicals to the ocean that basically influence the bio-geo chemical cycles of the Earth.

"These eruptions are very frequent.

"It's just that unless we get a pumice raft or significant seismicity next to a monitoring station, we have no idea that these eruptions are occurring."