The violent eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on January 15, 2022 injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere, enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic swimming pools.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When the volcano erupted, the seawater came into direct contact with the erupting lava and was superheated, creating “explosive steam”.
NASA scientists say the vapor will remain for years, likely affecting Earth’s global average temperature. Steam usually takes about 2-3 years to dissipate, but the water from the January 15 eruption could take 5-10 years to evaporate.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai “may be the first observed volcanic eruption to affect climate not through surface cooling caused by volcanic sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming,” Millán posited in an article.
A plume rises over Tonga after an eruption in January. 15.NOAA/SSEC/CIMSS via REUTERS The ash plume from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption the day after the eruption. Image from NASA’s Earth Observatory
Millán led a study that examined the amount of water vapor the volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.
Millán and his colleagues found that the Tonga volcano sent about 146 tetragrams (1 tetragram equals one trillion grams) of water vapor into the Earth’s stratosphere. The amount of water released into the stratosphere is equal to 10% of the water already present in the atmospheric layer. Their research was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The eruption comes from a volcano more than 12 miles wide. A day before the massive eruption, Tonga officials reported on Facebook that the volcano was continuously erupting. In the post, they reported that the volcano was sending a 3-mile-wide column of ash, steam and gas rising 35 miles into the atmosphere.
The researchers also looked at how water vapor could weaken the ozone layer that protects life on Earth from the sun’s harmful radiation.
Intact Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in 2015. NASA Earth Observatory image for Overview of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano last year.AP
The authors of the study said it is still too early to predict the exact climate effects of the Tonga eruption. “It is essential to continue monitoring the volcanic gases from this and future eruptions to better quantify their different roles in the climate,” Millán wrote.