Massive Tonga Volcano Eruption Blasted Enough Water To Fill 58,000 Olympic-Size
This looping video shows an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. The GOES-17 satellite captured the series of images that also show crescent-shaped shock waves and lightning strikes. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES imagery courtesy of NOAA and NESDIS
The unprecedented amount of water vapor hurled into the atmosphere, as detected by Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted, setting off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice and unleashing a tsunami racing around the world. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted a massive plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere. In fact, the unprecedented amount of water vapor was so enormous, that it was enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer volume of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a recent investigation examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.
This satellite image shows an intact Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in April 2015, years before an explosive underwater volcanic eruption obliterated most of the Polynesian island in January 2022. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey
Published in Geophysical Research Letters, the study by Millán and his colleagues estimates that the Tonga eruption sent an incredible 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere. That’s an amount equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere.
“We’ve never seen anything like it.” — Luis Millán
Millán analyzed data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument on NASA’s Aura satellite, which measures atmospheric gases, including water vapor and ozone. After the Tonga volcano erupted, the MLS team started seeing water vapor readings that were off the charts. “We had to carefully inspect all the measurements in the plume to make sure they were trustworthy,” said Millán.
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