The massive eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano near the Tonga island nation in the South Pacific, which generated a tsunami on Jan. 15, also produced the strongest thunderstorm on record. In all, more than 192,000 lightning bolts were recorded during the eruption.
A team from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Cascades Volcano Observatory and Los Alamos National Laboratory used optical sensors from two satellites and a global network of ground radio antennas thousands of miles away to capture the flashes. “This eruption produced a violent thunderstorm unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said Alexa Van Eaton, a USGS volcanologist.
“Nothing beats”
“We’ve found that volcanic clouds can create conditions for lightning far beyond the range of meteorological thunderstorms we’ve observed to date,” says the scientist. “It turns out that volcanic eruptions can produce more extreme lightning than any kind of thunderstorm on Earth. The scale really blew us away. We’ve never seen anything like it before, nothing like it in meteorological storms,” Eaton said.
Researchers recorded nearly 200,000 flashes
When the submerged volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted, a plume of ash, water and magmatic gas formed as high as 58 kilometers. At an altitude of 20 to 30 kilometers above sea level, this generated the highest lightning bolts ever recorded on Earth – apart from the so-called red sprites. The US researchers report that a total of nearly 200,000 lightning flashes were recorded in the eruption cloud during the eruption.
As evidenced by the data sent by the two satellites, the flashes did not spread randomly across the eruption cloud, but appeared in several doughnut-shaped rings. Such rings have been observed before, but never so many at once, the scientists write in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Shock waves went all over the world
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption was one of the strongest on record, according to the latest studies. The eruptions sent shockwaves around the globe and even to the edge of space. Fortunately, the eruption took place underwater and away from densely populated areas.
According to the US space agency NASA, the massive eruption of the submarine volcano was a hundred times stronger than the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which largely destroyed the Japanese city in 1945. The amount of energy released in the eruption “could have been equivalent to about four to eighteen megatons of TNT,” it says.
Source: Krone
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