It's official: after some careful data analysis, the Tonga volcano eruption of 2022 has been confirmed as the largest explosive eruption of the 21st century, and on par with the biggest eruptions ever recorded.
has been confirmed as the largest explosive eruption of the 21st century, and on par with the biggest eruptions ever recorded.
Having an algorithm like this has the potential to be incredibly useful, bearing in mind that a lot of eruptions happen in remote locations where there isn't a lot of equipment around to measure the event directly.What scientists do now have is a vast network of hundreds of seismic monitoring stations; these can very quickly pick up reverberations in the ground, even across long distances. It's those seismic waves that this new approach uses to calculate eruption size.
The eruption in January 2022 – the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption, to give its full title – destroyed 90 percent of the uninhabited island of Hunga Tonga Ha'apai, which itself only emerged in 2015 after another, smaller eruption.the way the volcano exploded directly into seawater rather than into the open air may have had something to do with the scale of the subsequent blast, and the strength and distance covered of the subsequent tsunamis as well.