The staggeringly powerful shock wave that rippled out from the Tonga eruption created its own tsunamis—in two different oceans.
on 15 January, it unleashed a blast perhaps as powerful as the world’s biggest nuclear bomb, and drove tsunami waves that crashed into Pacific shorelines. But 3 hours or so before their arrival in Japan, researchers detected the waves of another small tsunami. Even stranger, tiny tsunami waves just 10 centimeters high were detected around the same time in the Caribbean Sea, which is in an entirely different ocean basin.
But, “It’s almost certainly happened in the past,” says Mark Boslough, a physicist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. The discovery suggests the shock waves generated by explosive eruptions in Earth’s history, and by other violent cataclysms, like the airbursts of comets or asteroids colliding with the planet’s atmosphere, may have also created transoceanic tsunamis, perhaps with considerably bigger waves.
But strong weather events can also create shoreline wave surges, called meteotsunamis. Creating one requires a sustained atmospheric disturbance with a substantial pressure drop or jump. That air pressure wave also needs to move at roughly the same speed as the sea’s waves. As the waves travel together, Dusek says, “You just keep feeding energy into that wave, and it builds up and up and up.”
Gerard Fryer, an emeritus tsunami researcher at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, says Tonga’s shock wave tsunamis are not true meteotsunamis. “It doesn’t involve weather,” he says. But it did create a pressure wave that tracked with the shoreward motion of sea waves, he says, so it’s broadly in the same physics family.
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