The violent eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano near Tonga caused a variety of natural phenomena. One of the things that confuses scientists is the occurrence of ripples in the atmosphere that have never arisen before.
Satellite data from NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument shows unusual atmospheric gravitational waves since the eruption of the underwater volcano in Tonga.
"This is really something unique. We've never seen anything like this before," said Lars Hoffmann, atmospheric scientist at the Julich Supercomputing Centre, Germany.
"The instrument has been in operation for about 20 years now and we have never seen such a fine concentric wave pattern," he added.
Mysterious waves in the atmosphere. Photo: NASA
Seen in satellite recordings, there are waves in the form of circles that are quite neat. So far, scientists have not been able to find out exactly what caused it and how it relates to the eruption in Tonga.
"It makes us curious. It should have something to do with physics, but we don't know it yet," said Corwin Wright, an atmospheric expert at the University of Bath, England.
The eruption of an underwater volcano near Tonga is scary. Researchers at NASA also estimate that the power of the eruption was far more than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima at the end of World War II.
"We got the equivalent of 10 megatons of TNT," said James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
That is, the force of the Tonga volcano eruption is 500 times more powerful than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. So powerful that the eruption was heard even as far away as Alaska.
