Scientists are racing to understand the fury of Tonga volcanoes

December 20, Hunga Tonga – Hunga Ha’apai – an underwater volcano in the South Pacific with an uninhabited island on top – has woken up from a slumber that had been sleeping for seven years. The volcano crackled and crackled, producing a huge amount of ash. Ten thousand miles away in England, Simon Proud, a satellite data researcher at the University of Oxford, began using a series of satellites to monitor the twitching volcano.

As 2021 moves into 2022, the start of what appears to be an almighty eruption appears to have calmed down. Then, early on January 14, Tonga local time, a 12-mile-high plume of ash pierced the sky.Volcano becomes increasingly turbulent, hundreds of lightning discharges shot out of the vortex Every second, land and sea are being bombed.And a day later, in January 15th late afternoon, the satellite captured a disaster.

Back in England, when Proud woke up that day and checked his computer, he saw a grey tower that he or anyone else had never seen. Satellites captured images of the massive plume of volcanic ash billowing from 22 miles above the island, forming a murky, stormy canopy 160 miles long. Rising from the center of the canopy was a thin, short-lived spike of volcanic debris that reached an altitude of 34 miles—about five times the height of a cruising airliner. “What the hell is this?”, Proud recalls thinking at the time. “I looked at the data and I thought, it’s way beyond anything I’ve seen before. It’s just so unreal.”

The whole world was shocked.An explosion producing an ash cloud, estimated to be equivalent to 10 million tons of TNT, the released energy is 25,000 times lethal In August 2020, an explosion occurred in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. The Tonga eruption is easily one of the biggest explosions of the century. It didn’t stop there.

“Then there are shock waves,” said Mike Cassidy, a volcanologist at the University of Oxford. It emanated from the eruption at 600 miles per hour and caused a pressure spike on the other side of the planet. “No one has seen this before.” Within 20 minutes of the blast, a four-foot-tall tsunami wave swept through Tongatapu, the main island of the kingdom of Tonga. As a small tsunami hit Japan and the western coastline of the Americas, volcanic ash has flooded multiple islands in Tonga, choking off agriculture, polluting water supplies, damaging power infrastructure and cutting off roads and runways. Undersea communications cables linking the archipelago to the rest of the world were damaged, cutting off the country’s international phone and internet services. It probably won’t be fixed for a few weeks.

Volcanologists couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Whichever metric you choose, it’s an astonishing, scary outburst. As the volcanic unrest abated, a global detective story suddenly began. What geological event caused such a devastating eruption? What research is needed to solve the case?

General mechanism Volcanic eruptions are well known. But the catastrophic explosion on January 15 required a more thorough examination and ultimately a new explanation. When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted, Sean CroninA volcanologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, volcanologist or not, had the same reaction as everyone else: Omg.