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Tonga Volcanic Eruption Shock Waves


Rainshadow

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14 minutes ago, DebShadow23.0 said:

Saw it here, particularly the one just after midnight on Sunday.

 

tong.JPG

 

 

Amazing satellite footage of the eruption. Looked like a nuclear bomb going off.  I'm sure there is quite a bit of damage from that shockwave. 

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That is likely one of the coolest natural phenomena events any of us will witness in our lifetimes‼️

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NASA researchers have an estimate of the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga.

"We come up with a number that's around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent," James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR.

That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

https://www.mtpr.org/2022-01-18/nasa-scientists-estimate-tonga-blast-at-10-megatons

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2 hours ago, Chubbs said:

NASA researchers have an estimate of the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga.

"We come up with a number that's around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent," James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR.

That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

 

 

That's not particularly big as volcanoes go, somewhere between a 4 and 5 on the VEI --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_Explosivity_Index 

Mt. St Helens was more powerful, and Mt. Pinatubo much more powerful, than that.

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5 hours ago, jimmosk said:

 

That's not particularly big as volcanoes go, somewhere between a 4 and 5 on the VEI --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_Explosivity_Index 

Mt. St Helens was more powerful, and Mt. Pinatubo much more powerful, than that.

Yes, that's what the article said

In fact, Poland says, the real mystery is how such a relatively small eruption could create such a big bang and tsunami.

"It had an outsized impact, well beyond the area that you would have expected if this had been completely above water," he says. "That's the thing that's just a head-scratcher."

 

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Is the underwater aspect factored into the volcano scale? My understanding is that if the volcano is at the perfect depth, the interaction between the seawater and magma can be ridiculously explosive. 

I'm wondering if the VEI factors for that or is just concerned with the amount of energy released by the volcano itself. 

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2 hours ago, mshaffer526 said:

Is the underwater aspect factored into the volcano scale? My understanding is that if the volcano is at the perfect depth, the interaction between the seawater and magma can be ridiculously explosive. 

I'm wondering if the VEI factors for that or is just concerned with the amount of energy released by the volcano itself. 

Image

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21 hours ago, Chubbs said:

NASA researchers have an estimate of the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga.

"We come up with a number that's around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent," James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR.

That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

https://www.mtpr.org/2022-01-18/nasa-scientists-estimate-tonga-blast-at-10-megatons

I ran across one report that they doubled it to 1000 times as powerful. 

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