When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano within the Pacific Ocean erupted earlier this 12 months, the occasion was one for the report books — in a number of stunning methods.
The January 15 eruption was so explosive that it injected water vapor so excessive that it touched house, a first-of-its-kind statement for an earthly volcano. And the occasion produced the best focus of lightning ever detected — making it far flashier than the 2018 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia or the 2021 twister outbreak throughout the U.S. South.
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The eruption additionally launched a lot vitality that its disturbance of a charged layer of Earth’s environment, referred to as the ionosphere, rivaled that of a photo voltaic geomagnetic storm.
Seismologists, geophysicists and oceanographers described these and different eruption superlatives at a information convention on December 12 and in a number of displays in Chicago on the American Geophysical Union’s fall assembly.
“These are once in a lifetime … observations,” mentioned Larry Paxton, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
He and colleagues examined information from NASA’s Global Ultraviolet Imager, on a spacecraft in orbit across the Earth. On the day of the eruption, Paxton mentioned, the instrument revealed “something unusual” within the far-ultraviolet mild portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: a roundish spot within the satellite tv for pc information coinciding with the volcano’s location the place there was a brief lower in these UV emissions.
The instrument doesn’t see something within the environment under about 100 kilometers above sea degree, what’s usually regarded as the boundary of house. That implies that some kind of emitted materials — almost definitely water vapor from the undersea volcano — had reached excessive sufficient into house to briefly soak up these particles of sunshine, the researchers reported. Scientists had beforehand estimated that the eruption prolonged previous the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. The new discovering suggests the explosion reached even greater.
The volcano started erupting in December 2021 (SN: 1/21/22). By early January, it was already “one of the most prolific lightning producers” on the planet, mentioned Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with Vaisala Inc., an environmental devices firm headquartered in Vantaa, Finland.
Using Vaisala’s Global Lightning Detection Network, Vagasky and colleagues estimate that on January 15 alone, there have been not less than 400,000 lightning strikes at and across the volcano — an order of magnitude greater than typically noticed in Earth’s strongest supercell thunderstorms, Vagasky mentioned. “This was the most extreme lightning event ever detected by the global network.”
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Some of the volcano’s explosive vitality made it to the ionosphere, the layer of Earth’s environment the place charged plasma coexists with different atmospheric particles. Atmospheric strain waves from the eruption propagated into house, shifting the plasma round (SN: 8/29/22).
Those plasma shifts then rippled alongside Earth’s magnetic discipline traces, resonating by means of the ionosphere to disturb plasma 1000’s of kilometers away. “It’s like plucking a guitar string,” mentioned Claire Gasque, an area physicist on the University of California, Berkeley. (Gasque is the daughter of Science News’ information director, Macon Morehouse, who wasn’t concerned on this article.)
In the neighborhood of the volcano, that impact on the ionosphere from the January 15 eruption rivaled, and even surpassed, the affect of a minor photo voltaic geomagnetic storm that started on January 14, Gasque added. “Despite a simultaneous geomagnetic storm, the volcano dominated changes in ionospheric dynamics.”
“Most people think of space weather as caused by solar influences,” Gasque mentioned. But these information recommend a volcano can have simply as a lot energy.
The volcano could but break different data, the researchers mentioned, as scientists proceed finding out information from the highly effective explosion.