Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano eruption, Tonga, Tsunami(s)

[Astronuc]

Could it be that people imprecisely confuse runup height with wave height?

Possibly. That's what I was wondering.

 

[StevieTNZ]

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south...-the-nation-after-state-of-emergency-declared

Possible problem for a rebuild: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/po...debt-a-concern-in-tongas-posteruption-rebuild

 

[Jarvis323]

Does anyone know if there is any footage of the second eruption from the ground?

 

[Astronuc]

I've been looking at earthquakes in Tonga, and in few cases in the Fiji region, since the volcanic eruption.

Mag   Location                          Date/Time                        Depth
5.2  280 km SSW of ‘Ohonua, Tonga     2022-02-08 00:22:24 (UTC-08:00)   26.0 km
4.7   48 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-02-07 05:05:10 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
5.1  153 km WSW of Haveluloto, Tonga  2022-02-05 16:42:25 (UTC-08:00)  207.7 km
4.7  149 km SSW of Hihifo, Tonga      2022-02-05 00:20:47 (UTC-08:00)  184.7 km
5.0  133 km SSE of Hihifo, Tonga      2022-02-04 15:15:37 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
5.0   53 km WNW of Haveluloto, Tonga  2022-02-04 05:06:30 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.9  231 km S of ‘Ohonua, Tonga       2022-02-03 04:45:56 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6   51 km NW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga   2022-02-02 08:30:00 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
5.5   81 km ENE of ‘Ohonua, Tonga     2022-02-02 02:26:33 (UTC-08:00)    8.2 km
4.9   53 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-02-01 11:57:59 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6   36 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-31 14:18:32 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.7   67 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-31 12:07:12 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6   43 km N of Kolonga, Tonga       2022-01-30 09:53:26 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6  260 km WNW of Haveluloto, Tonga  2022-01-30 06:48:28 (UTC-08:00)  543.7 km
4.6   70 km SSW of Hihifo, Tonga      2022-01-30 03:56:25 (UTC-08:00)  147.3 km

4.9  ~68 km NW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga   2022-01-29 13:21:49 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.9   42 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-28 13:12:20 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6  141 km WSW of Haveluloto, Tonga  2022-01-28 10:58:08 (UTC-08:00)  203.6 km
4.9   61 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-27 17:33:38 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.7   53 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-27 03:14:22 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
6.2  225 km WNW of Pangai, Tonga      2022-01-26 22:40:05 (UTC-08:00)    4.2 km (very shallow
5.0   43 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-26 16:55:31 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6   68 km N of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga    2022-01-26 01:39:49 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.9   80 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-25 15:34:22 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.9  159 km NW of Neiafu, Tonga       2022-01-25 09:21:33 (UTC-08:00)  240.3 km
5.2   11 km E of Hihifo, Tonga        2022-01-24 19:25:27 (UTC-08:00)  132.5 km
4.8   57 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-24 15:29:36 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
5.0   56 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-24 13:16:57 (UTC-08:00)   99.3 km
4.7   28 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-24 03:36:30 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.8   53 km NW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga   2022-01-23 18:03:14 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6   47 km NW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga   2022-01-23 04:24:03 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km

4.8   73 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-22 13:21:26 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.6   60 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-22 03:09:33 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.8   83 km NE of Neiafu, Tonga       2022-01-22 01:23:40 (UTC-08:00)   35.0 km
4.7   44 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-21 21:12:33 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.8   54 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-21 11:50:43 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.8   43 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-21 05:22:33 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.7   45 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-20 21:45:58 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.7   76 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-20 15:33:52 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km
4.8   89 km NNW of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga  2022-01-20 12:05:30 (UTC-08:00)   10.0 km

A few in the Fiji region between Fiji islands and Tonga in the Lau Basin. The Fiji region are quite deep.

4.5                    Fiji region    2022-02-05 01:06:02 (UTC-08:00)  617.6 km
4.6                    Fiji region    2022-02-01 17:03:59 (UTC-08:00)  583.0 km
4.5      south of the Fiji Islands    2022-02-01 07:03:55 (UTC-08:00)  591.1 km

4.6                    Fiji region    2022-01-28 05:02:58 (UTC-08:00)  547.1 km
4.9      south of the Fiji Islands    2022-01-28 00:03:28 (UTC-08:00)  511.5 km
4.8                    Fiji region    2022-01-27 22:57:31 (UTC-08:00)  641.9 km
5.2                    Fiji region    2022-01-26 18:08:50 (UTC-08:00)  621.2 km

There is also considerable activity in the Kermadec region south of Tonga, but on the same subduction zone (trench/fault system). I haven't cataloged those yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga-Kermadec_Ridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga_Trench
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermadec_Trench

https://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Learnin...s/Ocean-Underworld/Trenches-and-Volcanic-Arcs

From 2011 - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2011JB008434

 

[Astronuc]

Update on Hunga-Tonga
https://www.wired.com/story/why-was-the-tonga-eruption-so-massive-scientists-have-new-clues/

Just how big was the January eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano? Four months of intensive science has only bumped up the scale. You could point to the audible booms that interrupted the night in Alaska, 6,000 miles away. Or perhaps to the tsunamis in the Caribbean, created by a rare form of acoustic wave that hopped over continents and stirred up the seas. In space, the weather changed too, NASA scientists said earlier this month, with winds from the blast accelerating up to 450 miles per hour as they left the atmosphere’s outermost layers. This briefly redirected the flow of electrons around the planet’s equator, a phenomenon that had previously been observed during geomagnetic storms caused by solar wind.

Teams from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and Tonga Geological Services and the University of Auckland. NIWA mapped the ocean floor outside the caldera/island, and then TGS/UAuckland mapped inside the caldera.

A day after the NIWA team released their findings, a second group of researchers at Tonga Geological Services and the University of Auckland helped fill in the map. Using a smaller ship that was less at risk from the bubbles, the team went out over the caldera with a similar set of acoustic instruments. Yep, it was a hole alright. The gash is 4 kilometers wide and 850 meters deep, and surprisingly constrained, hemmed in by the volcano’s original slopes. “What we have here now is a very large, very deep hole in the ground,” Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland, explained at a press conference in Tonga. “It helps us understand why the explosion was so very, very large.”

The two sets of observations are helping scientists to reconstruct a massive underwater explosion unlike any they’ve been able to study before. The imaging reveals that Hunga appears to have blown straight up and out. As the caldera broke apart in the early stages of the eruption, this likely introduced a flood of seawater that met deep regions of magma, firing off a chain reaction. More seawater, more magma, more explosions.

The caldera was so brutally emptied of magma that it has likely been reset to the state it was in 1,000 years ago, Cronin suggested, based on the dating of rocks from past eruptions. That’s a relief for Tongans still reeling from the eruption. But the region is pockmarked by similar volcanoes emerging from the sea.

The NIWA team set sail in April aboard the Research Vessel Tangaroa for four weeks of experiments. They worked in alternating 12-hour shifts as they raced to understand as much as they could in about a 22,000-square-kilometer region. They were lucky to have a point of comparison for the seafloor; in 2016, the area was mapped when a team aboard a research ship abandoned another mission nearby due to a broken piece of equipment, sailed for repairs in Tonga, and decided to stop by to map the area around Hunga—which had just begun the eruption sequence that would lead to the January blast.

Comparing the two maps was vital to see how little the surrounding terrain had changed, Mackay says. “Not only was the volcano intact, but we could see from the 2016 map that here’s a ridge and here’s a valley and here’s a knoll,” he says. “I’m seeing the same ridge, the same valley, the same knoll.” The team tallied up more than 6 cubic kilometers worth of ashy material layered on the seafloor, and suspects there’s more to find. (Tonga’s broken undersea internet cable was buried under 30 meters of it.)

NIWA report - https://niwa.co.nz/news/tonga-eruption-discoveries-defy-expectations

How the eruption unfolded.
https://www.wired.com/story/tonga-volcano-eruption-science/

On December 20, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai—an underwater volcano in the South Pacific topped with a diminutive and uninhabited island—awoke from a seven-year slumber. The volcano spluttered and crackled, creating a large plume of ash. Ten thousand miles away, in England, Simon Proud, a satellite data researcher at the University of Oxford, began to monitor the twitching volcano using an array of satellites.

As 2021 ticked into 2022, what had appeared to be the beginnings of an almighty eruption seemingly calmed down. Then, early in the morning on January 14 local Tongan time, a 12-mile-high plume of ash pierced the sky. The volcano became increasingly turbulent, and hundreds of lightning discharges shot out of the maelstrom every second, bombarding the land and ocean. And one day later, in the late afternoon of January 15, satellites captured a cataclysm in action.

 

[berkeman]

Wow.

 

[Astronuc]

Wow.

It's all a WOW event, but I was really amazed that the shockwave pushed/bulged the atmosphere, which I suppose shouldn't be a surprise given the scale of the explosion and the visible wave front traveling across the Pacific ocean.

 

[Astronuc]

Update - Tonga's volcano sent tons of water into the stratosphere. That could warm the Earth?

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming

The violent eruption of Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere — and the vapor will stay there for years, likely affecting the Earth's climate patterns, NASA scientists say.

The massive amount of water vapor is roughly 10% of the normal amount of vapor found in the stratosphere, equaling more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL099381

 

[Astronuc]

The initial tsunami wave created by the eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga in January 2022 reached 90 meters in height, around nine times taller than that from the highly destructive 2011 Japan tsunami, new research has found.

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-tonga-volcano-eruption-metersnine-taller.html

By comparison, the largest tsunami waves due to earthquakes before the Tonga event were recorded following the Tōhoku earthquake near Japan in 2011 and the 1960 Chilean earthquake, reached 10 meters in initial height. Those were more destructive as they happened closer to land, with waves that were wider.

 

[Astronuc]

Volcanologists determined the explosion's plume of ash and water from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai reached over 35 miles (105 km) high, the highest ever observed (some satellites used to observe Hunga Tonga weren't around for earlier eruptions, e.g., Pinatubo, 1991), reaching into the mesosphere.

To figure out the extraordinary height of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai's plume, the researchers used images gathered from three different weather satellites operated by three different nations: The U.S.'s GOES-17, Japan's Himawari-8, and South Korea's GK-2A. The pictures, sent back every 10 minutes, allowed the team to see the great blast from a variety of angles, and ultimately deduce the volcanic cloud's height.

https://mashable.com/article/volcano-eruption-highest-ever-plume-record-tonga

The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano reached the mesosphere
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4076About 7 years and two weeks from the 2014 eruption.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...apai-eruption-in-tonga-near-nukualofa.789761/

 

[Astronuc]

"The historic volcanic eruption at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano in the southern Pacific Ocean, about 65 km north of Tongatapu, Tonga's main island, was the largest since 1883 (Krakatoa/Krakatau between Java and Sumatra), and it caused a series of extraordinary occurrences, including a tsunami that reached as far as Japan and the Americas and shot a mind-boggling plume of water vapour into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools."
Ref: https://www.yahoo.com/news/powerful-volcanic-eruption-spurs-events-154945664.html

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who led a study analyzing the volcano's water vapour, said in August 20022. (article mentions 2002)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/to...precedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere
AGU paper - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL102341

Never-before-seen lightning intensity
At its peak intensity, the eruption generated 2,615 lightning flashes per minute, lasting for approximately five minutes. This replaces the previous record set in 1999, where 993 flashes per minute occurred over the southern United States.

Impressive "lightning holes"​

Following the eruption, the ash plume rapidly expanded outward in circular ripples, known as gravity waves. These waves triggered the formation of donut-shaped rings of lightning that surfed along their crests, with some of the rings measuring up to 280 km in diameter.

1883 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-1883-krakatau-eruption-a-year-of-blue-moons.html
https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/k/Krakatoa.htm

 

[Astronuc]

Hidden Volcano Abyss: Behind Tonga's Massive Eruption | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS





Tsunami waves and falling rocks from Hunga Tonga eruption.