On December 20, year Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai – an underwater volcano in the South Pacific Ocean topped by a small and uninhabited island – awakens from a seven-year slumber. The volcano splashed and cracked, creating a large pile of ash. Ten thousand miles away, in England, Simon Proud, a satellite data researcher at the University of Oxford, began tracking the convulsive volcano using a series of satellites.
As 2021 turns into 2022, what appears to be the beginning of an almighty eruption appears to have subsided. Then, in the early morning of January 14 Tongan local time, a 12-mile-high plume of ash pierced the sky. The volcano became more and more chaotic and hundreds of lightning bolts were released shot out of the maelstrom every second, bombarding land and ocean. And a day later, in late afternoon of January 15, satellites captured an active cataclysm.
Back in England, when Proud woke up that day and checked his computer, he saw an ash tower unlike anything he or anyone else had ever seen. Satellites have captured images of a giant column of ash rising 22 miles above the island into a 160-mile long and obscure canopy. From the center of the canopy rose a fragile, fleeting volcanic debris that reached a height of 34 miles – about five times the height of a passenger plane in flight. “What the hell is this?” Proudly recall the thought. “I looked at the data, and I thought, this is far beyond anything I’ve seen before. It is just wishful thinking. ”
Jaws fall all over the world. The explosion produced a cloud of ash, an explosion estimated to be equivalent to 10 million tons of TNT, releasing 25,000 times more energy than lethal energy explosion in the Lebanese capital Beirut in August 2020. The Tonga eruption is easily one of the biggest explosions of this century. And it doesn’t stop there.
“Then there was a shock wave,” said Mike Cassidy, a volcanologist at the University of Oxford. It erupted from a volcanic explosion at 600 mph and caused pressure surges on the other side of the planet. “Nobody’s ever seen that before.” Within 20 minutes of the explosion, tsunami waves 4 feet high hit Tongatapu, the Kingdom’s archipelago on Tonga’s main island. By the time small tsunamis hit Japan and the west coasts of the Americas, ash covered many islands in Tongan, killing agriculture, contaminating water supplies, disrupting infrastructure power floors and cut off roads and runways. The undersea communications cable connecting the archipelago to the rest of the world has been damaged, cutting off the country’s international phone and internet services. It probably won’t be fixed for several weeks.
Volcanologists could not believe what they were witnessing. Regardless of which metric you choose, this is an amazing, monstrous eruption. And suddenly as the volcanic violence subsides, a global detective story begins. What sequence of geological events created such a terrifying eruption? And what research needs to be done to crack the case?
General mechanisms widely known volcanic eruptions. But the catastrophic explosion on January 15 needs more scrutiny and, ultimately, a novel explanation. When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai broke out, Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, had the same reaction as everyone else, volcanologist or not: damn it.
