The powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga earlier this year released an unusual quantity of water vapour into the sky, which is expected to have an impact on Earth’s temperatures.
The local authorities referred to the January 15 eruption near the country of the Pacific archipelago as “an extraordinary calamity” since it resulted in a tsunami and a sonic boom that twice circled the Earth.
According to NASA, it also released enough water vapour to fill 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools into the stratosphere along with the ash.
According to scientists, it “broke all records” for the injection of water vapour since satellites started keeping track of such information.
The explosion sent nearly 146 teragrams of water between eight and 33 miles above the surface of the earth, according to measurements made by the Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA’s Aura satellite.
One teragram, which is equivalent to one trillion grammes, increased the total amount of water in the stratosphere by roughly 10%.
That is about four times as much water vapour as was thought to have entered the stratosphere during the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991.
The unparalleled plume, which eclipsed the force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, may have momentarily impacted the Earth’s average global temperature, according to scientists.
The water vapour measurements were “off the charts,” according to the team of atmospheric scientists led by Luis Millán of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The measurements in the plume had to be thoroughly examined to ensure their validity, according to Millán.
Only two earlier eruptions—the 2008 Kasatochi eruption in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile—have produced significant volumes of water vapour at such high altitudes since NASA started collecting data 18 years ago.
Both immediately subsided, but none of those occurrences came close to the enormous volume of water discharged by the Tonga incident.
Because the ash left behind by large volcanic eruptions reflects sunlight, they often induce a cooling of Earth’s surface temperatures.
The Tonga eruption stands in sharp contrast, since the water vapour it emitted had the ability to trap heat.
According to academics, it “may be the first volcanic eruption documented to effect climate via surface warming, rather than through surface cooling induced by volcanic sulphate aerosols.”
According to experts, this water vapour might linger in the stratosphere for a number of years, perhaps momentarily aggravating ozone layer depletion and raising surface temperatures.
Even if the water stays for decades, no lasting consequences should result from it.
Scientists claim that the impact wouldn’t be sufficient to dramatically increase the consequences of climate change since it would disappear after the excess water vapour cycled out of the stratosphere.
The undersea volcano’s caldera, a basin-shaped depression with a depth of around 490 feet, is cited by experts as the cause of the record-breaking eruption.
If the caldera had been much shallower, the saltwater wouldn’t have been hot enough to explain the readings of water vapour, and if it had been any deeper, extreme pressures may have dampened the explosion.