How fierce is volcanic lightning? The volcano in Tonga gives us a handful. Scientists recently discovered the moment when the Earth's nature produces the most intense lightning – the moment when the volcano erupts in Tonga.
The massive eruption of the submarine volcano of Tonga's Hongaha Ahaapai Island on January 15, 2022 is believed to be the largest volcanic eruption in a century, with more than 10 cubic kilometers (16 cubic kilometers) of surface material ejected into the atmosphere, and huge explosions can be heard in Alaska, North America, more than 8,000 kilometers away.
The shock wave caused by the explosion circled the Earth's atmosphere four times, and for the first time humans observed a tsunami caused by the shock wave, which swept the entire Pacific Ocean and even crossed the Central American isthmus, resulting in a tsunami in the Caribbean Sea.
The volcanic ash material and water vapor ejected from the seabed rushed to an altitude of 58 kilometers above the surface, the highest altitude of a volcanic eruption currently observed.
Such a large-scale volcanic eruption usually changes the earth's climate, but the Tonga volcanic eruption is located in the ocean, so that a large amount of surface material is mixed with seawater after the eruption, which makes the volcanic ash eject and then mostly fall back into the ocean, floating in the atmosphere less than 1/10 of the initial ejection, so it does not significantly affect the ocean climate.
The Tonga volcano is simply a textbook sample of the earth's geological activity and volcanic eruptions and other related fields, after its eruption, scientists have carried out a lot of research on it in many aspects, no, the study on volcanic lightning based on it has been released, and it has been found that its lightning intensity has broken the world record.
According to a research report released by Vaisala on January 8, a Finnish meteorological monitoring technology company, the eruption of the submarine volcano on the island of Aha Ahaapai in Tonga, on January 15 last year, sent a large amount of water vapor into the earth's atmosphere, causing an unusually dense lightning, within five minutes of the beginning of the eruption. Lightning flashed more than 25,500 times, 85 times per second and 425 times per minute, and more than 400,000 times were recorded by satellites and related instruments in the four hours after the eruption, when half of the world's lightning was concentrated on volcanoes in Tonga, which exceeded previous records.
Chris Wajaski, a meteorologist and lightning expert at Vaisala with the world's most sophisticated lightning monitoring equipment, said they have been tracking lightning around the world for 40 years, but the lightning from the Tonga eruption is the "most extreme" dense lightning ever detected, and it has never been seen before, which also gives a unique perspective on the scale of the Tonga volcanic eruption.
Why do Tonga volcanic eruptions produce so much lightning? In fact, not only the volcano of Tonga, but also other volcanic eruptions produce a lot of lightning, because the eruption of volcanoes causes violent activity of underground and surface materials and the nearby atmosphere, generating a large amount of electric charge.
Geologists believe that the mechanism of volcanic eruptions and earthquake eruption mechanisms are very similar, that is, a large number of positive charges will be produced before and after the eruption, a series of reactions triggered by the violent activity of the earth's lava and plates will appear a large number of positive charges, earthquakes usually appear in the form of earth light, that is, lightning that occurs on or near the surface, volcanic eruptions will also produce lightning in this mode, but the hot air flow and volcanic ash ejected by volcanic eruptions will also produce a large amount of charge when erupting and atmospheric shocks. These are mostly negative charges, and the potential difference formed will manifest as a column of volcanic ash smoke and frequent lightning in the nearby atmosphere.
Resources:
Global Times January 10 article "400,000 in 6 hours, Tonga volcano breaks lightning frequency record"
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