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The violent eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano of Tonga in January On January 15, 2022, it injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere, enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic swimming pools.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist who works at NASA. Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When the volcano erupted, seawater came into direct contact with the erupting lava and became superheated, creating “explosive steam.”
An umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on January 21. 15, 2022.
(NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES images courtesy of NOAA and NESDIS)
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NASA scientists say the steam will remain for years, likely affecting the Earth’s global average temperature. Normally, it takes about 2-3 years for the steam to dissipate, but the water from the Jan. 15 eruption could take 5-10 years to evaporate.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai “may be the first observed volcanic eruption to affect climate not through surface cooling caused by volcanic sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface heating,” he hypothesized. de Millán in an article.
Millán led a study examining the amount of water vapor that the volcano injected into the stratospherethe layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.
Millán and his companions found than the Tonga volcano It sent about 146 tetragrams (1 tetragram equals one trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere. The amount of water released into the stratosphere is equal to 10% of the water already present in the atmospheric layer. His research was published in Geophysical investigation letters.
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The eruption came from a volcano that is more than 12 miles wide. A day before the massive eruption, Tongan officials reported on Facebook that the volcano was continuously erupting. In the post, they reported that the volcano was sending out a 3-mile-wide plume of ash, steam, and gas rising to an altitude of 35 miles in the atmosphere.
The researchers also noted how water vapor could weaken the ozone layer that protects life on Earth from the sun’s harmful radiation.
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The study authors said it is still too early to predict the exact climatic effects of the Tonga eruption. “It is critical to continue monitoring volcanic gases from this and future eruptions to better quantify their different roles in climate,” Millán wrote.
