Tonga underwater volcano eruption shattered two records.

[LazyHippo]

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted last month.

 

An underwater volcano in the South Pacific erupted last month and shattered two records simultaneously: The volcanic plume reached greater heights than any eruption ever captured in the satellite record, and the eruption generated an unparalleled number of lightning strikes — almost 590,000 over the course of three days, Reuters reported.

 

"The combination of volcanic heat and the amount of superheated moisture from the ocean made this eruption unprecedented. It was like hyper-fuel for a mega-thunderstorm," Kristopher Bedka, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center who specializes in studying extreme storms, said in a statement from the NASA Earth Observatory. "The plume went 2.5 times higher than any thunderstorm we have ever observed, and the eruption generated an incredible amount of lightning."  

 

The volcano, called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, lies about 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa and sits within the so-called Tonga-Kermadec volcanic arc, a line of mostly underwater volcanoes that runs along the western edge of the Pacific Plate of Earth's crust, Nature magazine reported.
The eruption began on Jan. 13, launching  explosions that broke the water's surface and generating a major lightning event, according to Reuters. Then, on Jan. 15, rising magma from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai met the seawater above the volcano, triggering a sudden and massive blast. Such explosive eruptions can occur when magma rapidly heats water into steam, which then quickly expands; bubbles of volcanic gas caught within the magma also help to drive these dramatic blasts up and out of the water, Nature reported.

 

Underwater volcanic eruptions don't typically release large plumes of gas and particles into the air, but the Jan. 15 eruption was an exception to this rule, Nature reported.

 

Two weather satellites — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's  Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 17 (GOES-17) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Himawari-8 — captured the unusual eruption from above, allowing scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center to calculate just how far the plume penetrated the atmosphere. 

"From the two angles of the satellites, we were able to recreate a three-dimensional picture of the clouds," Konstantin Khlopenkov, a scientist on the NASA Langley team, said in the statement.