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The volcanic eruption in the sea off the island nation of Tonga in January sent a record amount of water into the atmosphere, a study by Nasa shows. So much so that it can temporarily affect the Earth’s average temperature.
The eruption from the underwater volcano Hunga on January 15 was so powerful that it was recorded worldwide. When the seawater met the hot lava, an explosion of a rarely seen kind was simultaneously formed.
Now calculations from the American space agency Nasa show that the cloud, which reached at least 35 kilometers high, contained more water than had ever been measured before.
A whopping 146 million tons of water, enough to fill 58,000 Olympic swimming pools, was sent up into the atmosphere.
“We have never seen anything like this,” says Luis Millán, one of the researchers behind the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, in a press release.
May raise the temperature
The extreme amount of water vapor even has the potential to affect the average temperature of the Earth, albeit temporarily. And that to the warmer.
Usually, eruptions lead to a decrease in temperature, as after the volcano Pinatubos in the Philippines in 1991, whose large amount of sulfur dioxide and ash lowered the average temperature of the Earth by half a degree. On the contrary, the water vapor caused by Hunga is expected to trap heat and raise the temperature. However, the effect disappears as soon as the steam seeps out of the stratosphere.
Registered worldwide
The Jan. 15 eruption of the underwater volcano Hunga was the largest since 1883 and caused enormous devastation on the tiny island nation of Tonga six miles away. The broadband cable that provided internet to the island nation was knocked out and the ash both poisoned the drinking water and destroyed crops.
The blast, which was hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in Japan, was recorded around the world and the sound wave traveled three times around the earth.
The eruption also triggered tsunamis that reached all the way to New Zealand and caused flooding in California.