When Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted violently earlier this year, it shot an unprecedented volume of water vapor into the sky, which will almost certainly have an influence on Earth’s temperatures.
The January 15 eruption near the Pacific archipelago country triggered a tsunami and a sonic boom that circled the Earth twice, and was regarded as a “unprecedented calamity” by the local authorities.
According to NASA, it pushed not just ash into the stratosphere, but also enough water vapor to fill 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Scientists stated it smashed “all records” for water vapor injection since satellites started collecting such data. Images from drones, planes, and even the International Space Station caught the magnitude of the explosion.
An picture from a NOAA GOES-West satellite taken on January 15, 2022 shows the eruption of an undersea volcano off the coast of Tonga.
The Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA’s Aura satellite, which studies atmospheric gases, discovered that the explosion sent around 146 teragrams of water to the stratosphere, which is located between eight and 33 miles above the planet’s surface. A teragram is equivalent to a trillion grams, and such high amount boosted the total amount of water in the stratosphere by roughly 10%.
That’s about four times the quantity of water vapor expected to reach the stratosphere from the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. Scientists believe that the extraordinary plume, which eclipsed the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, may have a short-term impact on the Earth’s global average temperature.
“We’ve never seen anything like that,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose team reported “off the charts” water vapor measurements.
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This satellite picture was taken in April 2015, years before an enormous undersea volcano eruption devastated the majority of the Polynesian island in January 2022.
JESSE ALLEN, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY IMAGE, USED LANDSAT DATA FROM THE US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
“We had to thoroughly analyze all of the measurements in the plume to ensure they were reliable,” Millán said.
Only two earlier eruptions, the 2008 Kasatochi eruption in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile, have transported significant volumes of water vapor to such high altitudes since NASA started gathering data 18 years ago. Both evaporated fast, and neither compared to the massive volume of water released by the Tonga event.
Because the ensuing ash reflects sunlight, powerful volcanic eruptions often lower Earth’s surface temperatures. The Tonga eruption, on the other hand, stands out because the water vapor emitted may trap heat.
According to the researchers, it “may be the first volcanic eruption documented to alter climate not via surface cooling induced by volcanic sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming.”
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An photograph from the International Space Station taken on January 16, 2022, shows the ash plume from the previous day’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption.
NASA
According to experts, this water vapor might stay in the stratosphere for many years, possibly aggravating ozone depletion and boosting surface temperatures. The water might linger for decades, but it should not have long-term consequences.
“The impact would disappear as the excess water vapor cycles out of the stratosphere and would not be sufficient to appreciably worsen climate change consequences,” scientists write.
The undersea volcano’s caldera, a basin-shaped depression roughly 490 feet deep, is thought to be the cause of the record-breaking eruption, according to experts. The saltwater would not have been hot enough to account for the water vapor observations if the caldera was shallower, and if it was even deeper, strong pressures may have muffled the explosion.