When a deep-sea volcano near Tonga’s Hunga Tonga island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean erupted in January, it created a volcanic plume that reached high into Earth’s atmosphere, according to a report published this week in the Science journal.
Researchers said the “Hunga Tonga volcano eruption, one of the largest eruptions ever recorded,” had a cloud that “reached an altitude of 57 kilometers, well past the stratosphere and into the mesosphere and higher than any volcanic plume previously recorded.”
“Explosive volcanic eruptions can loft ash, gases, and water into the stratosphere, which affects both human activities and the climate,” the report said.
Its authors said the Hunga Tonga eruption marks the first time any volcanic plume has been seen to penetrate the stratopause, which separates the upper atmosphere from the lower atmosphere.
“The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano includes the small islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai along with shallow reefs along the caldera rim of a much larger submarine edifice in the western South Pacific Ocean,” according to the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History Global Volcanism Program. Its first recorded eruption was in 1912.
During the eruption this January, an under-water fiber optic communication cable was severed and recovery efforts were required, said the program.
It went on for 12 hours and triggered a tsunami.
“Only small remnant of the islands remained visible above the ocean surface,” in the wake of the tsunami, the Smithsonian said.
To study the eruption, researchers who contributed to the recent report used geostationary satellite images.
“We then discuss potential implications of this injection and suggest that the altitude reached by plumes from previous eruptions, such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, may have been underestimated because of a lack of observational data,” they said.
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