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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| NASA scientists estimate Tonga blast at 10 megatons |
| 2022-01-20 |
| A BLAST or a 'burp'? [NPR.ORG] NASA researchers have an estimate of the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga."We come up with a number that's around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent," James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR. That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II. The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "This might be the loudest eruption since [the eruption of the Indonesian volcano] Krakatau in 1883," Poland says. That massive 19th-century eruption killed thousands and released so much ash that it cast much of the region into darkness. In the case of this latest event, Garvin says that he believes the worst may be over — at least for now. "If the past precedent for volcanic eruptions in this kind of setting has any meaning at all," he added, "then we won't have another one of these explosions for a while." |
| Posted by:Fred |