Tonga volcano eruption

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in January had scientists scrambling to figure out what caused such a massive explosion, ...

We've already brought up that magma from 5km depth suddenly to the shallow depth and we're dropping water in on top of it. The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in January had scientists scrambling to figure out what caused such a massive explosion, which then triggered a devastating tsunami. "Our first theory which we carried on holding on to for a couple of months was that there was a collapse of the sides of the volcano, like the Mount Saint Helen's style collapse," Cronin says. "There were so many questions about what was going on and that volcano - I knew the volcano very well, so it was something like two o'clock in the morning I was busy beavering away writing the first article on what was going on in Hunga." "Then all of a sudden all the links to Tonga broke down, so I had no local information, just what we were getting through in terms of some of the satellite information about the size of the event." "I rushed back to my home office and opened up all the files, looked for all of the information I could find, and it looked like a very big eruption," he says.

The January event was far bigger than any 20th Century volcanic event, or indeed any atom bomb test.

Scientists are still investigating the generation of near-field tsunamis that ran up coastlines in the Tongan archipelago. "If ever you wanted evidence that the atmosphere is a remarkably interconnected thing, this was it. They are also non-dispersive, in other words they maintain their shape as they move and so are conspicuous over a long time. Infrasound has frequencies that are just below what humans are capable of hearing. That catastrophic event in Indonesia is thought to have claimed more than 30,000 lives. These are energetic waves in the air that propagate at the speed of sound, along a path guided by the surface of the planet.

The 'truly global event' lifted cloud over the UK and generated small tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea.

Seafloor examination will determine how much, if anything, a collapse of part of the volcano contributed to them. "If ever you wanted evidence that the atmosphere is a remarkably interconnected thing, this was it. They are energetic waves in the air that travel at the speed of sound and are able to maintain their shape along a path guided by the surface of the planet.

Four months on from the violent explosion of the Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano, scientists are still piecing together what caused the biggest eruption the ...

We've already brought up that magma from 5km depth suddenly to the shallow depth and we're dropping water in on top of it. Instead, what Cronin discovered was that the middle of the volcano's caldera - the large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses - was far, far deeper than expected. But once Cronin arrived in Tonga and got out on a boat to survey the volcano, that theory went out the window. "Our first theory which we carried on holding on to for a couple of months was that there was a collapse of the sides of the volcano, like the Mt Saint Helen's style collapse," Cronin says. "There were so many questions about what was going on and that volcano - I knew the volcano very well, so it was something like 2 o'clock in the morning I was busy beavering away writing the first article on what was going on in Hunga." "I rushed back to my home office and opened up all the files, looked for all of the information I could find and it looked like a very big eruption," he says.

The Hunga volcano ushered in 2022 with a bang, devastating the island nation of Tonga and sending aid agencies, and Earth scientists, into a flurry of ...

The researchers were most interested in the behavior of an atmospheric wave known as a Lamb wave, which is the dominant pressure wave produced by the eruption. “We have more than a century of advances in instrumentation technology and global sensor density,” Matoza said. The Lamb wave consisted of at least two pulses near the volcano. This was the same as scientists observed in the 1883 Krakatau eruption. The Jan. 15 eruption generated a variety of different atmospheric waves, including booms heard 6,200 miles away in Alaska. UC Santa Barbara’s Robin Matoza led a team of 76 scientists, from 17 nations, to characterize the eruption’s atmospheric waves, the strongest recorded from a volcano since the 1883 Krakatau eruption.

It was so powerful, the force lifted cloud over the United Kingdom and generated small tsunamis in the Medi...

Seafloor examination will determine how much, if anything, a collapse of part of the volcano contributed to them. "If ever you wanted evidence that the atmosphere is a remarkably interconnected thing, this was it. They are energetic waves in the air that travel at the speed of sound and are able to maintain their shape along a path guided by the surface of the planet.

A pair of research papers published in the journal Science have reviewed data and found the enormous eruption of the underwater volcano at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha' ...

Seafloor examination will determine how much, if anything, a collapse of part of the volcano contributed to them. “If ever you wanted evidence that the atmosphere is a remarkably interconnected thing, this was it. They are energetic waves in the air that travel at the speed of sound and are able to maintain their shape along a path guided by the surface of the planet.

The extent to which the eruption affected the planet, and even influenced weather patterns in space, has been reported in two new studies.

There’s never been a more important time to explain the facts, cherish evidence-based knowledge and to showcase the latest scientific, technological and engineering breakthroughs. The Geophysical Research Letters study has analysed data from NASA’s Ionosphere Connection Explorer (ICON) mission and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm satellites. “We have more than a century of advances in instrumentation technology and global sensor density,” Matoza says. Please support us by making a donation or purchasing a subscription today. They claim they’re the strongest recorded from a volcano since the 1883 Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia. These are longitudinal pressure waves, like sound waves, but are of incredibly low frequency.

Scientists analysing data from the volcanic eruption found it was the largest explosion since 1883, and roughly comparable to the Krakatoa eruption in ...

"[Another eruption] will happen. Scientists said nuclear explosions that have also created Lamb waves — such as the largest nuclear test in the USSR in 1961 — were of similar amplitude but lasted for a shorter period of time compared to large volcanic explosions such as the one in Tonga. The Tonga volcanic eruption produced similar Lamb waves as the Krakatoa eruption that killed more than 30,000 people.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption in January triggered unexpected stronger-than-hurricane winds in the highest layer of Earth's atmosphere, ...

The Hunga Tonga eruption was the most powerful volcanic explosion to have shaken Earth since that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Fortunately, only three people died in the tsunami triggered by the eruption, despite the damage the waves caused in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga. "The equatorial electrojet is a very strong electrical current of hundreds of kilowatts that exists in a narrow band near the equator," said Harding. "It's a result of some complicated physics that go on in Earth's magnetic field. Measurements by ICON, as well as those by Europe's three-satellite Swarm mission, revealed that this electrojet went haywire in the days after the Hunga Tonga eruption. They were more powerful than any of those caused by the countless geomagnetic storms, which the planet has experienced in that period of time as a result of the sun's activity. Previously, scientists mostly thought that the ionosphere is quite isolated from the planet and only affected by the activity of the sun.