The 2022 Tonga undersea volcano eruption was one of the largest ever recorded

Be happy this was not an above ground volcano eruption or we would have witnessed another global crisis after Covid-19, the Russian war of aggression in the Ukraine, and global price inflation!

If I am not mistaken, this enormous volcano eruption was barely mentioned in the news!

"A new analysis has verified that the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai undersea volcano in January 2022 was among the most explosive volcanic eruptions ever recorded. It was the largest volcanic eruption of the 21st century and also the largest eruption since the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. ...
Hunga Tonga erupted on January 15 of this year after a string of lesser eruptions that started in December 2021, creating a vertical plume that rose more than 50km (30 miles) above the earth’s surface. The eruption triggered a tsunami so severe that it killed two people in Peru and injured two more in California — despite being thousands of miles away."

 

From the abstract:

"The January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haapai eruption was one of the most explosive volcanic events of the modern era, producing a vertical plume which peaked > 50km above the Earth. The initial explosion and subsequent plume triggered atmospheric waves which propagated around the world multiple times. A global-scale wave response of this magnitude from a single source has not previously been observed. Here we show the details of this response, using a comprehensive set of satellite and ground-based observations to quantify it from surface to ionosphere. A broad spectrum of waves was triggered by the initial explosion, including Lamb waves propagating at phase speeds of 318.2±6 ms-1 at surface level and between 308±5 to 319±4 ms-1 in the stratosphere, and gravity waves7 propagating at 238±3 to 269±3 ms-1 in the stratosphere. Gravity waves at sub-ionospheric heights have not previously been observed propagating at this speed or over the whole Earth from a single source. Latent heat release from the plume remained the most significant individual gravity wave source worldwide for >12 hours, producing circular wavefronts visible across the Pacific basin in satellite observations. A single source dominating such a large region is also unique in the observational record. ..."

The 2022 Tonga volcano eruption was one of the largest ever recorded

Why the Tongan eruption will go down in the history of volcanology The 15 January blast sent shock waves around the globe and defied scientific expectations. Researchers are now scrambling to work out why.

Surface-to-space atmospheric waves from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption (no public access. Google Scholar provides this link to the PDF)