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The powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga on January 15, 2022 injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Louis Millan, an atmospheric scientist who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When the volcano erupted, seawater came into direct contact with the erupting lava and was superheated, creating “explosive steam”.
An umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on January 15, 2022. (NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES imagery courtesy of NOAA and NESDIS)
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NASA scientists say the vapor will remain for years, possibly affecting Earth’s global average temperature. The 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 volcanic eruption observed to affect climate not through surface cooling caused by volcanic sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming,” Millan hypothesized in a paper.
Millán led a study examining 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.
Milan and his colleagues found that the Tonga volcano sent about 146 tetragrams (1 tetragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into the Earth’s stratosphere. The amount of water shot into the stratosphere is equal to 10% of the water already present in the atmosphere. Their research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
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The eruption came from a volcano that is more than 12 miles wide. A day before the massive eruption, Tongan officials announced on Facebook that the volcano was erupting continuously. In the post, they report that the volcano sent a 3-mile-wide plume of ash, steam and gas rising 35 miles into the atmosphere.
The researchers also note how water vapor can weaken the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from harmful radiation from the sun.
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The study’s authors said it was still too early to predict the exact climate effects of the Tonga eruption. “It is critical that we continue to monitor volcanic gases from this eruption and future ones to better determine their distinct role in climate,” Millan wrote.
Sarah Rumpf is a digital production assistant at Fox News. You can reach her on Twitter at @rumpfsarahc
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