November 3, 2022, 10:15 PM
November 3, 2022, 10:15 PM
The powerful underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano that occurred on January 15 in the South Pacific generated a fumarole that reached 57 km in height, which makes it the highest ever recorded, as detailed this Thursday (November 3) in a study published by the journal Science.
The fumarole passed through the mesosphere
Likewise, the great column of gases became the first to have crossed the mesosphere: “The mesosphere is one of the upper layers of the atmosphere and it’s usually pretty calm – there’s no nice weather up there, and the air is very dry and extremely thin,” said Simon Proud, lead author of the research.
“It is one of the least known parts of the atmosphere, as it is very difficult to reach. Below it we can use airplanes. Above, meanwhile, we have spacecraft. Many meteors burn up in the mesosphereand also hosts noctilucent (night-glow) clouds, which are sometimes visible in the summer sky towards the poles,” added the specialist from the University of Oxford.
The fumarole was far from reaching the next atmospheric layer, the thermosphere, which begins about 85 km above the surface from the earth. A delineation called the Karman line, 100 km above the Earth’s surface, is generally considered the limit to space.
The scientists They emphasized that this great fumarole was mainly composed of a mixture of waterash and sulfur dioxide, which differs from terrestrial eruptions, which lack water.
The deafening eruption sent tsunami waves across the Pacific Ocean and produced an atmospheric wave that went around the world several times.
“What’s impressive to me is how quickly the eruption happened. It went from nothing to a 57-kilometer-high cloud in just 30 minutes. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see that,” Proud added.
Three satellites to measure its height
The highest fumaroles previously recorded correspond to Mount Pinatubo de Philippines in 1991 (40 km) and El Chichón in Mexico in 1982 (31 km). It is likely that other eruptions produced taller smoke plumes, but such measurements could not be made before. The Krakatoa fumarole in Indonesia (1883) probably also reached the mesosphere.
The scientists resorted to three meteorological satellites that obtained images every 10 minutes and were based on what is called the parallax effect, that is, determining the position of something by viewing it along multiple lines of sight.
A rash that could have been worse
The damage and loss of human lives -six deaths- were relatively low due to the remote location of the eruption, although it devastated a small, uninhabited island. Tonga is an archipelago of 176 islands with a population of just over 100,000 people, located southeast of Fiji.
“It could have been much worse,” Proud mused, about this impressive phenomenon of nature.
