Experts believe that the explosion of the underwater volcano Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Haapai may be the most powerful since the catastrophic eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia, which killed thousands of people in 1883. The January 15 eruption left the nearby islands of Tonga covered in ash, and a massive tsunami forced the evacuation of 230,000 coastal residents of the Japanese Islands from eight prefectures and flooded or capsized a dozen ships, writes NPR.

To assess the power of this eruption, scientists applied a scale that is also used to assess the explosive power of nuclear weapons. James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said the observations yielded "a number equivalent to about 10 megatons of TNT." With an estimated explosion yield of 10 megatons of TNT, the volcanic eruption corresponds to the power of approximately 667 atomic bombs of the "Kid" type, which was dropped by an American bomber on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945.

The eruption took place near the Pacific island nation of Tonga, but the explosion was heard thousands of kilometers away, for example in Alaska. Scientists said that this is probably one of the most high-profile events on the planet in the last hundred years. Apparently, the cause of the explosion was the fact that the flows of liquid magma came into contact with sea water that flooded into the caldera. However, these events on Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Haapai did not last that long - less than 60 minutes - and the total energy costs were relatively small. Geologists do not expect this eruption to cause any significant short-term changes in the Earth's climate, as has happened with some major eruptions in the past.

bbabo.Net