Massive eruption at Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai produces huge shockwave and tsunami

I should try to track it down. Thanks!

 

I've been watching too much Randall Carlson lately. This stuff just makes me think of what things were like after the Younger Dryas impact(s) 13,000 years ago or after the Burckle crater impact 5,000 years ago.

 

Why the volcanic eruption in Tonga was so violent, and what to expect next

 

Just amazing how big this is including how it caused a pressure wave traveling around the world. Thankfully it doesn't sound like there are any casualties from this but just a reminder of how powerful the Earth is.

 

Let me guess...the one before the last one was in AD100?

 

From what I remember reading, it was around 200 A.D.

 

Reminds me of one of my favorite Onion headlines, from Our Dumb Century: "US Finds Last Place on Earth Untouched by War, Blows it to Hell"

 

Comes very close to describing what happened!

 

While earthquakes and volcanoes are among the most devastating things on this planet if we didn't have them life on Earth might not have gone beyond the single cell stage. Because we have a liquid core and mantle means that we have a magnetic fields that protects us from the solar wind that would've stripped our atmosphere like Mars. Plate tectonics and volcanoes help to cycle minerals and other elements that are necessary for life from deep in the Earth. Also the long term movement of continents compels evolution to advance by creating different conditions that life has to adapt to.

 

Sadly there are casualties from this and Tonga is struggling in the aftermath. Also it's hard to get aid there.

 

NASA Scientists Estimate Tonga Blast At 10 Megatons

According to NASA researchers, the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga was equivalent to around 10 megatons of TNT. "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," reports NPR. From the report:

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. "This might be the loudest eruption since [the eruption of the Indonesian volcano] Krakatau in 1883," Poland says. That massive 19th-century eruption killed thousands and released so much ash that it cast much of the region into darkness.

But for all its explosive force, the eruption itself was actually relatively small, according to Poland, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Unlike the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which spewed ash and smoke for hours, the events at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai lasted less than 60 minutes. He does not expect that the eruption will cause any short-term changes to Earth's climate, the way other large eruptions have in the past. In fact, Poland says, the real mystery is how such a relatively small eruption could create such a big bang and tsunami.
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The damage in Tonga is sounding out to be much worse than initially reported. Because a lot of communications were cut off and the ash cloud was obscuring things it was hard to tell how bad the situation was. Now we are seeing whole communities flattened while most of the rest of the country covered with ash.
https://weather.com/news/trending/video/tonga-volcano-wipes-out-entire-communities

 

Holy crap, The 5th Dimension is way less white than I expected.