According to the National Public Radio website reported on January 17, NASA researchers estimated the power of the Tonga volcano eruption on the 15th. James Gavin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Center, said: "The figure we came up with is about 10 million tons of TNT equivalent. This means that this eruption is more than 500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima nuclear explosion in Japan before the end of World War II.
Michael Pollan, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said the sound of volcanic eruptions was even heard as far away as Alaska. "This is probably the loudest eruption since the eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia, in 1883," he said. Gavin said the worst of the worst in the case of this Tonga eruption may have passed — at least for now.
Three days after the eruption, Tonga has not regained much of its contact with the outside world. Submarine communications cables appear to have been cut and the airport is covered in volcanic ash, preventing rescue planes from landing in the capital Nuku'alofa. NASA teams have been studying the eruption in recent years.
Gavin said Tonga's islands are on the subduction belt. Subduction zones are tectonic zones in the Earth's crust that subduct one plate below another. Between late 2014 and early 2015, at the edge of the crater, a build-up of volcanic activity surfaced, forming a new island. Steam and volcanic ash eventually connected the Hongatonga-HongAha Apay volcano with two nearby islands that formed earlier.
Source: Informational messages
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