Nuclear war possibilities with Russia or the Kardashians latest actions are very important, but something not playing too well in media is the Tonga volcano. It should. It was historic.
The massive volcano blew a week ago (and caused a Pacific wide tsunami) was so strong, so enormous, that is has shattered records ..
It is being reported that the volcano blast was so powerful that it was detected as far away as Antarctica. According to media statements, Ronan Le Bras, a geophysicist with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria, which oversees an international network of remote monitoring stations, reported the Antarctica register..
In total, 53 detectors around planet Earth heard the low-frequency boom from the explosion as it traveled through the atmosphere. It was the loudest event the network had detected in more than 20 years of operation, according to Le Bras.
“Every single station picked it up,” he says. “It’s the biggest thing that we’ve ever seen.”
This is how NPR reports (read it in your quiet voice for full maximum effect):
The exact cause of the explosive eruption at the island, known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, remains a mystery. Garvin and his team believe the root cause was a massive influx of seawater into a chamber filled with magma. The island had been growing rapidly as recently as December of 2021, and Garvin suspects that the “plumbing” beneath the surface shifted as the island expanded. But even that explanation requires a lot more fleshing out, says Ken Rubin, a volcanologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Simply putting rock and magma into contact won’t always generate an explosion, he says.
The eruption was 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima..
It was so loud that many on Tonga went deaf in the aftermath..
