In a written statement from NASA, according to the detection of the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) device on NASA’s Aura satellite, which measures atmospheric gases, including water vapor and ozone, a large amount of water vapor sent to the atmosphere with the volcanic eruption that occurred in Tonga in January It was stated that it may cause temporary heating of the surface. According to the statement, when the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga in the Pacific Ocean erupted on January 15, it sent a rapidly spreading tsunami all over the world and caused a sonic boom that surrounded the world twice. In that volcanic eruption, a cloud of water vapor large enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic swimming pools was blasted into Earth’s stratosphere, and this massive amount of water vapor could temporarily affect Earth’s average global temperature.
“NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE”
Luis Millan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who led a new study looking at the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano sends into the stratosphere, which is an atmospheric layer about 12 to 53 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, said: “There’s never been anything like this before. We had not seen it,” he said. In the research, published in the academic journal Geophysical Research Letters, Millan and his colleagues estimate that the eruption in Tonga sent about 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals 1 trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere. It is stated that this amount is equal to 10 percent of the water already present in the atmosphere layer.
WATER STEAM CAN STAY IN THE STRATOSPHERE FOR A FEW YEARS
In the statement, which stated that volcanic eruptions rarely send large amounts of water to the stratosphere, only 2 more eruptions, the Kasatochi event in Alaska in 2008 and the Calbuco eruption in Chile in 2015, in the 18 years that NASA has made measurements, said that a significant amount of water has been reached at such high altitudes. It was stated that he sent steam. It was stated that these events were insignificant compared to Tonga, and the water vapor from the two previous eruptions quickly dissipated, but the water vapor sent by the Tonga volcano could remain in the stratosphere for several years. The statement also noted that large amounts of water vapor from the explosion may have a small, temporary warming effect, as water vapor traps heat, but is not expected to worsen climate change conditions. (DHA)