The eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano in the South Pacific launched a towering, mushroom-shaped cloud of ash and dust at least 20 kilometers into the atmosphere.
about the recent eruption, why its tsunami was so unusual and his and his colleagues’ efforts to piece together the volcano’s history. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.What’s happening in the eruption’s aftermath? Satellite images show a cloud of sulfur dioxide from the volcano over the Pacific.Yes, the plume is stretched out really long now to the northwest. It’s quite high in the atmosphere, over 25 kilometers in elevation.
The January 15 eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano caused extensive damage to the Tongan island of Nomuka, 70 kilometers away. Two days after the eruption, heavy ash covered much of the once verdant island, as shown here in a photo taken during a surveillance flight by the New Zealand Defense Force.A secondary problem is drinking water: The ash has salts in it that dissolve in water and turn it acidic. Around 50 percent of Tongans have their water from roof-fed rainwater supplies.
As we were driving [offshore] with the multibeam, we started seeing a whole lot of other little submarine volcanic cones. It was like, “Wow, look at that!” And then we realized that they were all within a deep basin, about 150 meters deep. The little cones were actually all inside one large submerged caldera, about 6 kilometers across.
On the rim of the volcano’s large underwater caldera sit two small, uninhabited islands, Hunga Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai . Before the January 15 event, a small volcanic cone sat between the two islands. That land bridge was the remnant of an earlier eruption in 2014-2105. An image taken a few days after the volcano’s massive blast on January 15 shows that the cone has vanished and the islands have sunk. Small floating rafts of pumice streak across the waves.
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