The powerful eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere — and the water will stay there for years, possibly affecting Earth’s climate patterns, NASA scientists say.
The vast amount of water vapor is approximately 10% of the normal amount of vapor found in the stratosphere, which is equivalent to more than 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said atmospheric scientist Louis Millan, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Milan leads a study of the water that the volcano sends into the sky; the team’s research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The volcano sent vapors and gases to record heights
The Jan. 15 eruption came from a volcano that is more than 12 miles wide, with a caldera located about 500 feet below sea level. A day earlier, Tongan officials reported that the volcano was in continuous eruption, sending a 3-mile-wide plume of steam and ash into the sky. Then came the big bang, which sent ash, gases and vapor up to 35 miles high – a satellite-era record – into the atmosphere.
Drone and other video footage from the day showed the dramatic scale of the blast as the volcano shot an incredibly wide plume into the sky. The intense eruption sent a pressure wave circling the Earth and caused a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska.
The sheer amount of water is likely to raise temperatures
Earlier large volcanic eruptions have affected the climate, but they usually cool temperatures because they send light-scattering aerosols into the stratosphere. These sprays act like a massive layer of sunscreen. But because water vapor traps heat, Tonga’s eruption could temporarily raise temperatures slightly, the researchers said.
It usually takes about 2-3 years for sulfate aerosols from volcanoes to fall out of the stratosphere. But the water from the January 15 eruption could take 5-10 years to fully dissipate.
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Given this time frame and the extraordinary amount of water involved, 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 by warming the surface,” the researchers said in their paper.
NASA says the data for the study came from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument on the Aura satellite, which measures water vapor, ozone, aerosols and gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
The volcano interrupted the “pulsation” of water in the stratosphere
The January 15 eruption strongly disrupted annual water patterns in the stratosphere (which also contains most of the atmospheric ozone).
The normal mechanism by which water rises into the stratosphere is so reliable that researchers call it something like a tape recorder, recording annual temperature cycles through alternating bands of dry and moist air rising from the tropics.
January is usually the middle of the dry period in this seasonal cycle, but then the Tonga volcano erupted in the South Pacific, suddenly injecting a huge amount of water high into the atmosphere.
“By short-circuiting the path through the cold spot, [Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai] has disrupted this “pulsating heartbeat” signal in the planet’s normal atmospheric water pattern, the researchers said.
They recommend careful monitoring of the water from the volcanic eruption, both to predict its impact in the near future and to better understand how future eruptions may affect the planet’s climate.
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