Mount Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai erupted earlier this year. The eruption sent a powerful tsunami across the Pacific Ocean on January 15, 2022. Not only did this eject hundreds of millions of tons of volcanic ash into the stratosphere, this eruption also generated shock waves that reached the planet's ionosphere, the outermost layer of the atmosphere at an altitude of up to 650 kilometers!
The shock wave was so powerful that it set off winds of staggering speeds of up to 720 km/h, at altitudes of up to 190 km. In fact, the strongest storms on Earth 'only' reach maximum wind speeds of around 320 km/hour. This 190 km altitude is even far above the official space limit, called the Karman line, which is at an altitude of approximately 100 km.
"I don't think any of us expected to see something this big," said Brian Harding, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a new study describing the observations. /2022).
"We expect the disturbance to be small, like small ripples entering the ionosphere," he continued.
Harding worked with data from a NASA mission called the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON). If previously, scientists mostly thought that the ionosphere was not greatly affected by the conditions of our planet and was only affected by solar activity, in fact the disturbances detected after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption were very significant.
The Hunga Tonga eruption was one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions to rock the Earth. The explosion can be heard at a distance of more than 10,000 km, and the resulting pressure wave circles the planet four times. 'Fortunately', this disaster only claimed three lives in the tsunami triggered by the eruption. Even so, the damage caused by these waves was felt especially in Polynesian Tonga.
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