The Tonga underwater volcano started erupting on Dec. 20, 2021, and grew very large and powerful nearly four weeks later when it climaxed on Jan. 15, 2022. The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption destroyed the island. A team of researchers at Japan's Nagoya University is using the data from the eruption to track airwaves and tsunamis.
They believe that tracking shockwaves from the eruption that also caused disturbances in the ionosphere could lead to speedier predictions of future giant waves and tsunamis.
Tsunami Prediction Could Become Possible Using Data From Tonga Underwater Volcano Eruption
Tonga Volcanic Eruption Generated Shockwaves That Reached Space
According to NASA, the Tonga volcanic eruption in January sent atmospheric shockwaves, sonic bombs, and tsunami waves worldwide. But they also confirmed that the volcanic eruptions caused waves that reached space.
An analysis from the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission and ESA's Swarm satellites showed that hurricane-speed winds and unusual electric currents formed in the ionosphere hours after the eruption. The ionosphere is Earth's electrified upper atmospheric layer at the edge of space.
Physicist Brian Harding from the University of California, Berkeley and the lead author of a paper published in the Geophysical Research Letters that discussed these findings, said that the volcanic eruption created one of the largest disturbances in space that has ever been observed in modern science.
The ICON spacecraft passed over South America when it observed an earthly disturbance in the ionosphere triggered by the South Pacific volcano.
Jim Spann from NASA's Heliophysics Division said that these results show how events on Earth could affect space weather and vice versa. Understanding space weather holistically will help scientists mitigate its effects on the planet.
NASA said that the Tonga volcanic eruption pushed giant plumes of gases, water vapor, and dust into the sky, creating large pressure disturbances in the atmosphere that caused strong wings that expanded upwards into thinner atmospheric layers. ICON recorded a 450 mph wind speed in the ionosphere, making it the strongest winds below 120 miles altitude that it had measured since it launched.
ALSO READ: Hunga-Tonga Eruption: Strongest Volcanic Explosion of the Modern Era Based on Magnitude, Speed
Predicting Tsunamis Using Shockwaves of the Tonga Underwater Volcanic Eruption
Nagoya University's Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE) researchers collaborated with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology and the University of Electro-Communications to analyze data about the atmospheric disturbances from the Tonga underwater volcanic eruption.
In their report published in Earth, Planets, and Space, the team noted that they used satellites and radar to examine disturbances caused by the volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga. They found that it caused waves of air pressure as far as Japan and Australia as the waves oscillated in the lower ionosphere and generated an electric field transmitted at high speed to the upper ionosphere.
Despite being in different hemispheres, Phys.org reported that the structures of the disturbances over Japan and Australia mirrored each other and occurred almost simultaneously because of the electrons in the magnetic field lines that radiate from the south to the north magnetic pole.
Assistant Professor Atsuki Shinbori said they captured the signal of the ionospheric disturbance about three hours before the pressure wave from the volcanic eruption that is believed to have triggered the tsunami in Japan. That means that the significance of the results could be divided into two - scientific and disaster prevention.
ISEE researchers noted that future applications of the technique are already being considered. Shinbori said that statistical analysis of ionospheric disturbance signals might help researchers estimate future tsunami wave heights and sizes.
RELATED ARTICLE: Tonga Volcano Eruption Created Almost 590,000 Lightning Strikes For 3 Days That Nearly Swallowed Neighboring Islands in the Archipelago
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