It banged, pulp and lightning. An underwater volcano erupted later in the Tonga region and lifted a huge ash cloud near the islands of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apain.
In a couple of days, the satellites took pictures of a number of ash clouds and wild lightning that rose to a mile.
Attention has aroused the very abundant lightning of the ash cloud in particular.
On Saturday, the volcano produced as many as 200,000 flashes in about 1.5 hours, the meteorologist said Chris Vagasky To HS. Vagasky, who lives in Colorado, USA, works for the Finnish company Vaisala, which manufactures weather equipment, and is an expert in lightning.
Usually, eruptions talk about thousands of lightning strikes per hour.
“For comparison: 2021 flashes were measured in Finland as a whole, ie last year – that is, in Finland as a whole, and during the year,” says Vagasky in a telephone interview.
Vaisala has equipment and a system that can use radio waves to record lightning strikes anywhere in the world: at sea, in the mountains, and in places where there are no other weather services.
What to explain raging lightning?
“Apparently, along with the lava and ash, salty seawater has also risen to the atmosphere in different pockets. It freezes high enough, ”Vagasky ponders.
As frozen water evaporates and is released, it encounters various particles in the atmosphere.
“And when different brands of charges meet in the atmosphere, the result is lightning,” Vagasky says.
The phenomenon is not well known, but the relationship between ash and ice must be just right for lightning.
In some the weather satellites have radars to see everything through the ashes, smoke and clouds. They testified that the central part of the islands was lost in a volcanic explosion.
The European Union’s Sentinel-1A satellite captured the volcanic area late Saturday. The pictures showed that much of the island buildings had been destroyed.
Weather satellites also recorded a wave from the eruption on Saturday. A small tsunami moved from the eruption site in all directions in the Pacific. The height of the wave in the Tonga region was about 1.2 meters.
The streets are flooded in the capital of the island nation, Nuku’alofa, about 70 kilometers south of the volcano. The eruption also brought water to the streets in Peru in South America.
The explosion also produced a loud shock wave. It propagated in the atmosphere at the speed of sound, or about 1,235 kilometers per hour. The blast was also heard in parts of New Zealand, about 1,500 miles southwest of Tonga, The National Geographic reports.
Of destruction there is no clear picture yet. It is also not known exactly what an exceptionally spectacular eruption is about and what the consequences will be.
The islands at the site of the eruption are located over a volcanic area more than 20 kilometers wide. There is a pot-like pit about five kilometers wide that is hidden by the sea.
Weaker eruptions have been seen on the islands several times since at least 1912. The eruption of 2014–2015 gave birth to an island from lava.
Two uninhabited islands were already symptomatic a few weeks ago. In between it was calmer until the volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga erupted violently. It is located on the islands of Ha’apain.
However, a cloud about 15 kilometers high before Christmas was not considered unusually large because it was an underwater eruption. Such also produces a lot of water vapor.
Now the eruption is moderately large in the area. Geologists have estimated that an eruption of this size will occur in the area about once a thousand years.
There are relatively many volcanoes in the Tonga region, most below sea level.
Underwater and terrestrial volcanoes erupt on Earth at points where continental plates meet. Rather, we should be talking about the tiles of the earth’s crust and mantle, that is, the tiles of the lithosphere.
The islands of Tonga belong to the area where the Australian tile and the Pacific tile meet. The movement of continental plates is the fastest in the Pacific, up to 15 centimeters a year.
There are about 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth. Three of the four are located on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire.
The area following the Pacific coasts extends from South America through the seas of North America, Alaska and Japan to New Zealand and Australia – as well as Tonga.
When the slabs meet and one slab protrudes under the other, magma, or molten rock, is often released at the point of abrasion.
It first floats in the upper parts of the earth’s crust and comes in eruptions up and out of the volcano as lava, whether the eruption is below the surface of the water or on earth.
Great volcanic eruptions can temporarily cool the entire global climate.
Volcanoes blame huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. It combines with water vapor in the atmosphere. This creates fog, small droplets or aerosols that increase the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.
The big eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 is estimated to have lowered the average global temperature by about half a degree.
The phenomenon lasted for two years. Pinatubo produced much more and longer sulfur gases than it does now in Tonga.
Tongan it is far too early to assess the impact of the eruption on global average temperatures.
An underwater eruption produces a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere. Therefore, the eruption may appear larger outward than it was.
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