The Tonga volcanic eruption in January was the largest atmospheric explosion documented since the 1883 Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia, according to scientists.
Tonga was hit by an underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano and subsequent tsunami on Jan. 15, which wiped out an entire village on one of Tonga’s small outer islands and killed at least three people.
Robin Matoza, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led 76 scientists in a study on the volcanic eruption in Tonga, which was published on May 12 in Science Journals.
The study described the volcanic eruption as an “unusually energetic explosion” that generated “a broad range of atmospheric waves observed globally by various ground-based and spaceborne instrumentation networks.”
…