Wow!:It takes roughly 900-1000 years for the Hunga volcano to fill up with magma, which cools and starts to crystallize, producing large amounts of gas pressure inside the magma. As gases start to build up pressure, the magma becomes unstable. Think of it like putting too many bubbles into a champagne bottle -- eventually, the bottle will break.
As the magma pressure rises, the cold and wet rock above the magma fails and suddenly releases the pent-up pressure. The eruption we saw on Saturday blasted rock, water, and magma 30 km high into the atmosphere, and was profound in terms of its energy. Within 30 minutes, the resulting cloud seen from space was over 350 km (or 218 miles) in diameter, with ash falling out onto several Tongan islands.
The sound wave is
so impressive!:
Corwin Wright was on NPR
explaining some of this stuff:In theory, the rapid updraft of hot air and ash from an erupting volcano into the upper atmosphere could trigger gravity waves on a much larger scale. But nothing like this has been observed with previous eruptions analysed since the AIRS instrument was launched in May 2002.
“That’s what’s really puzzling us,” says Corwin Wright, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath, UK. “It must have something to do with the physics of what’s going on, but we don’t know what yet.”
He and his co-workers suspect that a “great big, messy pile of hot gases” in the upper atmosphere might be what kicks the waves off. The hot gas is “going up high into the stratosphere and knocking the air around”, he says.
And the sounds of the explosion, as heard in ALASKA! Sound waves can travel far, and can be refracted back to the ground when the atmosphere is stable. It is likely that the early hour
favored the Alaskans hearing the explosions.
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