How big was the Tonga eruption? | Hacker News Reader

How big was the Tonga eruption?

graphics.reuters.com

I posted a visualization of the shock wave as a submission, but I"ll repost it here. This is a satellite measurement of integrated atmospheric water vapor (IIUC), so changes in the density of air change the integrated measurement, such that you can see the shock wave travel around half the globe.

https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2022/01/22...

(it take a few seconds to load, but I believe this is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen).

This is a 140 MB gif ◑﹏◐

I hope you don't mind, I reuploaded as an MP4: https://imgur.com/BbaLE5U

As a 27mb video: https://imgur.com/a/dqc2Gii

I think it's super noisy so it doesn't compress well.

139MB is utter insanity for an animated GIF.

Crushing it with gifsicle can get it down to 125MB but clearly GIF is the wrong choice of format here.

Here's a HEVC compressed video version which is only 25M and suffers only extremely mild softness: http://david.gloveraoki.net/f/32M.mp4

It would probably be even better if I could work with the source video and not the gif version.

I love how the helpful engineers of hacker News come to the aid of the poor soul who's inadvertently uploaded their video of the biggest eruption in the last 30 years in the wrong format or without the proper compression. I love that...it's like, 'happy to help to make everything more efficient!'

In other news IT still takes days to get back to me about getting my BYO device onboarded...

I'm not saying it's a paradox just noticing the juxtaposition

> In other news IT still takes days to get back to me about getting my BYO device onboarded...

Perhaps those IT folks are busy procrastinating by optimizing gifs using ffmpeg on HN

idk, I had no issues loading the gif and playing it. For some reason your video doesn't want to play in Chrome. I had to download it first.

Back when I had a 500MB data plan, a partner sent me an 80MB gif which kicked me offline for several days. It's good to warn people about large files.

That's a good point! Didn't think about that.

Your video doesn't work either but the GIF worked fine. I get MIME type not found for yours.

Also the video is full of very fine scale noise. Something that won't compress by HEVC very well at all. You want a lossless compression method (or a very high perceptive index on HEVC).

Is interesting Gif size. With ShareX I get massive Gifs, but Kap on Mac I can get much smaller files (this is 14fps). Same for screentogif massive files... not sure what makes them so big.

I wonder if the eruption could be heard on the exact opposite side of the globe, where the waves converged?

This would have been somewhere around 20.570000, 4.620000, in Guezzam, Algeria, according to: https://www.antipodesmap.com

Not sure if anyone heard it but I know it registered very clearly on barometers in London, so it's not out of the question.

It was apparently registered 3 times on Iceland (almost opposite side of earth) - apparently it was big enough to travel 3 times around the globe!

I was wondering the same thing. One factor might be the variation in propagation speed, which is visible for example due to winds near low pressure systems.

Another fact is the Earth is not a uniform sphere so the waves wouldn't exactly converge in a uniform circular condensation on that exact spot.

Unless you already factored that in...

What’s happening immediately east of the eruption? There is a point water vapor variability in the center of the shock wave start and another single point of water vapor variability of equal size without a shockwave.

Very cool!

Gives great intuition for geometric spreading on the surface of a sphere!

Modulo phase velocity and attenuation, it makes clear that the amplitude/energy density could actually increase past the great circle!

Incredible! Thanks for posting this.

Honest question - is this animation in real time, or sped up?

Heard it go bang, 2600km away, echoing through the hills around our place at the top of the South Island of New Zealand. That's pretty staggering to think about it. Then to see other peoples Home Assistants around the world pick up the change in pressure on opposite sides of the planet. Mental, just mental...

I live on the beach on the East coast of Australia. We had a marine tsunami warning. We were a few floors up so I wasn't really worried about myself.

About 12ish hours after the initial eruption I thought that anything that was going to happened had all passed by hours ago and I was talking with friends online.

Randomly I started hearing this white noise kind of sound (it sounded like the bubbling water of a kettle without any whistling). I took my headphones off and opened my door trying to find the source of the noise, thinking that the kettle had turned on.

I looked outside and what was small surf conditions only 3 minutes before was extremely turbulent with white frothy waves moving in every direction. It looked like it was reacting to an earthquake but there was no movement in the ground. (I've felt an earthquake there before which is rare here but since our foundations are in the sands I've had the experience and could tell there was no earthquake in the ground on the morning after the eruption)

Since the waves were moving in every direction, some of them were colliding head on. When this happened and the peaks and troughs were interacting in the right way they were shooting out jets of water spray at my eye level about 15m above sea level (I could tell since they were intersecting the horizon from my perspective).

It continued for about a 30 seconds, calming down over another 30 seconds. After the surf had lowered itself to its previous levels, the whole top of the water going back about 50ish meters was covered in thick brown foam. All of the turbulent waves had dredged up the sand beneath it.

The foam slowly disappeared over about an hour with the last bits being the foam that ended up getting washed ashore and out of the water's reach.

Transport this event and yourself back to the bronze age and you could start a new religion with the other people who saw this.

I've heard that the Krakatoa eruption was so loud that the sound wave reverberated around the globe several times. I assume that means if you're on exactly the other end of the world, the sound is coming at you from every direction? Similarly, no matter where you are on earth, the sound is coming at you from different directions at different times? Of course, I'm assuming that the sound wave was in audible frequencies which may or may not be the case...

Even exactly on the other side of the world, the sound will reach you at different times from different directions due to different pressures, temperatures, mountains, etc. on the way.

But there would be a spot where the pressure waves would cross?

There's an animation of the antipode from this eruption arriving in northern Africa and it's interesting how distorted the incoming wavefront is.

https://twitter.com/weather_models/status/148300643675002880...

Sounds like the hairy ball theorem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem)

The earth is (almost) an oblate ellipsoid so most geodesics on earth aren't closed and even if they all meet (do they? I need to to think about this or play with GeographicLib) at one point they are of different lengths (imagine a point on the equator, the latitudinal path is quite different from the longitudinal path). And then there are different propagation velocities due to pressure, terrain, etc. So probably not.

> But there would be a spot where the pressure waves would cross [simultaneously]?

There could be, but it's not immediately obvious that there has to be.

It does seem like certain points would need to be on 'cusps' of the wavefront, though, so something like getting the wave from the north and the northeast 'simultaneously'.

Not necessarily. The set of points reached last by the waves could be multiple points, or a line, or multiple lines.

I think it’s highly unlikely that even half the pressure waves would simultaneously reach a single point on earth. The waves get reflected in all kinds of ways by the ground, mountain ranges, difference in air temperature, etc.

If they did, however, I wonder how strong the force would be at its focus (if that’s the proper name)

(If I did my math right, the antipodes of Tonga live in the south of Algeria, near the Niger/Mali/Algeria tripoint. I haven’t heard of weird phenomena happening there, but then, I don’t think that is the most populated and most twitter-addicted part of the world)

I think so. I think there is necessarily a circle "eversion" (turning it inside-out) with a crease. Whatever is the point of the crease would hear sound from all directions. Even with something like a figure 8 collapsing wavefront, eventually one or more creases should form.

If the crease is a line, would it not sound like comming from two opposite directions simultaneously?

My back yard weather station picked up the shockwave here in the bay area: https://twitter.com/DavidCWG/status/1482451910154014720

I had no idea that was even possible. Crazy stuff.

Mine picked it up too - in Portugal.

Teeny little dip and crest, and I wasn’t sure until the meteorological station in a city 30km tweeted that they’d seen it too, and the times coincided (well, I was about a minute later) very neatly.

> the bay area

It's always interesting that anyone who lives in a "Bay", refers to their local as THE Bay. For this phenomenon, which is documented as circling the globe, who knows where this could be!

The "Bay Area" is well known to refer (only) to the San Francisco Bay, while the "Greater Bay Area" is known to only refer to the Pearl River Delta Bay (HK, Macau, Guangdong). Other bays are typically named more specifically (e.g. Tokyo Bay, Monterey Bay, etc.).

You'd be more on point if OP had referred to San Francisco as "The City" as many in the City do; since that's something that's also used in other cities like NYC.

NB: current resident of the Greater Bay Area in China and former resident of the lesser Bay Area in California.

no, there’s multiple areas with bays, there’s only one Bay Area.

> there’s only one Bay Area

I suspected you were just assuming that, so I googled it, and found quite a few.

I was outside in my backyard when I heard a mild crashing sound around 7 or 8am in Toronto. I thought the neighbour had dropped a ladder or metal garbage can or something…but after reading the news I realized it could have been the Tonga explosion.

May I kindly ask the make and model of your weather station please?

I noticed the same on all in Aqara Zigbee temperature/pressure/humidity sensors. They're all inside, I could still easily see it twice (many hours apart). Though I only noticed after someone in a Home Automation topic mentioned seeing the effect ;)

Nothing fancy was needed for this, the sensor I'm talking about is battery operated. I have this one: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WSDCGQ11LM.html or this one: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WSDCGQ12LM.html (they look alike too much).

It's a Davis Vantage Vue.

What did the “bang” sound like? Was it the sharp crack of thunder close by, the slower rumbling of distant thunder, the sound of fireworks exploding, or would some other description fit better?

I also heard it in the north of the South Island of NZ. To me it sounded like very distant explosions, like a cannon firing, or avalanche control explosives.

We heard multiple explosions over the span of a minute or two, presumably from the multiple paths the sound took as they all sounded the same.

Close up (next island over) it was a low loud fast boom like dynamite going off nearby. Over in an instant. From a Facebook video. Really strange that it would sound that way.

Here's a video with several pre-thuds then a VERY LOUD bang about 1m50s in ... 'sposed to be from Tonga. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGV5payoRYs

My colleague's backyard weather station picked up the pressure wave in Christchurch several times as it repeatedly circled the globe.

Sea levels in the upper south were a little 'odd', trending higher and more variably than usual, even if not by that much, for a week.

Here in California in the Sierra Nevada, a pressure variation was noticeable around 4am pacific.

Hadn't thought of that. Just checked the data from my weather station, and there's a definite spike, followed by a drop.

30.16 inHg just before, 30.19 spike followed by an immediate drop to 30.14, then basically normalized again.

I find it difficult to believe that even a massive eruption could literally push sea levels up or down in the surrounding area (waves /= sea level). Volcanoes are massive, but the energy to move cubic miles of water, water many hundreds or thousands of miles away, is at different level. Hurricanes can move water like that, but they do so with orders of magnitude greater energy (tens of thousands of nukes).

US tsunami monitoring has a record.

https://www.tsunami.gov/previous.events/?p=03-19-09-Tonga

A tsunami is a wave. Not sea level. Waves literally come and go over a period of seconds to minutes. They wobble back and forth without actually moving much water. Sea levels move on the order of hours and days and involve the physical movement of literally hundreds of cubic-miles of water. Raising or lowering a sea level measurement (not a temporary wave) requires far more energy than a volcano.

From the link: "Listed wave heights are maximum amplitude in cm (above sea level)." In other words, even tsunami waves heights are not changes to sea level.

A tsunami is an entirely different kind of wave than a normal wave.

A normal wave is transverse, and a tsunami is a pressure wave. The first bobs the water up and down and the wave moves forward, the second shoves water ahead of it, displacing it upward into the wave.

The tsunami won't break when the column gets short, but rather transfer all of the energy of moving a deep water column to a shallow one. That's what makes them dangerous.

I don't think anyone - except perhaps you - is suggesting that the eruption caused an actual rise in sea levels.

They were initially responding to a comment that said sea levels were slightly elevated for a week after the eruption. I have to agree that's pretty weird even for a tsunami.

> A tsunami is a wave. Not sea level. Waves literally come and go over a period of seconds to minutes. They wobble back and forth without actually moving much water. Sea levels move on the order of hours and days and involve the physical movement of literally hundreds of cubic-miles of water.

You should be aware that tsunamis behave in the way you're calling "sea level", and not in the way you're calling "wave". It's true that a tsunami is a wave, but it's not true that they come and go over a period of minutes, or that they fail to move much water. They're very large.

Some of them, specifically those involving undersea plates moving upwards, but even those do settle out quickly. That is why the term literally means "port waves" because they bypass normal wave protections and move into ports, similar to how tidal bores move up rivers. But the comment above spoke of sea levels being impacted for many days, something beyond even thrust tunamis and more akin to hurricanes.

Think of it more like a very long period wave, much like a tide, but on a much shorter time period than the tide. Tides, waves (periods on the order of seconds), and tidal waves (or tsunamis) are all fluctuations in sea level. Water can be moved when the waves encounter enclosed bays or harbors. Think of the water level dropping 3 ft over 20 minutes in front of a harbor entrance and imagine the currents that can result.

Here's an example of observations from coastal California (red line shows sea level measured every 6 minutes: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/waterlevels.html?id=941211...

It is truly amazing - I'm not surprised that it's hard to believe.

If it has a period not tied to the rotation of the earth (ie tides) then it is not a change in sea level but a wave. And Tsunami does not translate as "tidal" wave. It means "port wave" and has nothing to do with tides whatsoever.

That's from 2009. I can't figure out how to navigate the site so as to find the 2022 event.

Talk about long distance effects....

"Tonga volcanic eruption shockwave reached the Netherlands"

https://nltimes.nl/2022/01/16/tonga-volcanic-eruption-shockw...

There was a report from a climate org in Miami that they recognized the pressure pulse 9 times, once each ~35 hours since the eruption.

We also heard it while tramping on the thousand acre plateau just north of Murchison. It was very quiet, so we were lucky to be where we were with no noise pollution to drown it out.

Though at the time we had no clue what it was, we joked about being in the Tomorrow series timeline.

Takaka or Motueka? I used to live in that area. Golden Bay has a pretty unique geographical layout!

This is an excellent lesson in how shitty my sense of geographic scale is.

I would have guessed that the size of the eruption was on par with the size of a small city.

The Pacific Ocean is ginormous (I think that’s the technical term?) I often find myself surprised when I spin a globe (physical or virtual) and compare the expanse of the ocean to my neighborhood of the planet. The scale also makes the history of Polynesian seafaring all that more incredible.

I recently read a book about South America and learned there’s genetic evidence Polynesians made there in about AD 1200, which is amazing.

There’s also I think some mystery about some South American DNA that doesn’t support the land bridge hypothesis. I don’t know if that’s well supported or not/evidence might be poor, haven’t bothered to do any digging. I think that’s distinct from what was found linking some populations to Polynesians and suggests there might have been seafaring people that made it even earlier, but I’m not sure.

Yes, they had incredible techniques. They could detect a remote island by the way the swell is disrupted. Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it.

> Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it.

Well, they didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage

> Of the 270 men who left with the expedition, only 18 or 19 survivors returned.

A 93% mortality rate really isn't a success by any metric. Losing 80% of your ships is nothing to be proud of either.

I don't see the point of your snark. What they did was quite hard for the time. What point are you trying to make?

They set themselves a task that they weren't up to, and they failed at it. It doesn't make sense to say "it is remarkable that they made it", because they didn't make it.

You know this happened 500 years ago, right? If someone did this today and had that death rate, I would absolutely agree, but the challenges then were drastically different. No, not everyone made it, but those who did were the first to circumnavigate the planet - and they very much did make it.

A little off topic, but as a reminder of how different the world used to be: families used to move across the US on foot, maybe with a wagon carrying their supplies, and many died doing so. I'm quite thankful I can just get on a plane to see my family :).

Also, as someone who needs to remind themselves occasionally to be less negative, I would encourage you to be less negative about things that aren't 100% a success.

P.S. If you really want to hate on Magellan it would make sense to do so for something like him burning a village in Mactan because they didn't want to convert to Catholicism[0], not this. You may be pleased to hear that this directly led to his death.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mactan

I know this is days late but I don't understand how you can say the voyage was a failure? They hobbled back home for sure, but they made it!

By any metric related to exploration they were wildly successful. The amount of information that was gathered and relayed on a single voyage at that point in history was astounding, and the story was incredible.

Some experts prefer ‘humongous’. ;)

Our previous Commanding General once quipped that PowerPoint presentations that transition between geographic focus areas should include slide after slide after slide of blue ocean, to communicate the vast distances involved in our Area of Operations. Otherwise no one appreciates the distances between the islands that are of interest. Too many people think Hawaii and Guam and the Philippines and Okinawa are all just down the street from each other.

I mean your not wrong, the article is illustrating the mushroom cloud and ash cloud after 24 hours. So the explosive eruption its self is much smaller.

"Around the time of the initial eruption, a cloud measuring 38 km (24 miles) wide is thrust into the atmosphere. Its diameter already measures almost twice the length of Manhattan, New York. One hour later, it appears to measure around 650 km wide, including shock waves around its edge."

One hour.

Sanity check: it's never dark in the animations, which it would be if the images were taken over 24 hours. In other views you can see the night approaching.

After 1 hour actually, not 24 hours. But it is really mostly a huge ash cloud, not the explosion itself.

650 km in 1 hour (in diameter), aka 325 km/hr, aka about 1/4 the speed of sound. So yes that's basically the explosion.

Actually, when you put it like that. Yikes! That's a crazy amount of energy!

My cheap weather station has recorded the blast wave three times.

https://michilehr.de/the-eruption-of-hunga-tonga-volcano-and...

Nice! Mine caught it as well. https://social.dssr.ch/display/47b62552-9461-e5ad-2f0a-4e261...

I find the mix of your commas and periods in numbers a little confusing.

>305,8 m/s but also 8.7m and ~1.4 hPa.

I know that Europeans have a different notation to Americans, but is there a rule here I am missing?

No, there is no missed rule, the comma is the only official decimal separator in these parts. But I can relate to the the OP. Us here in the comma world are forever converting numbers in CSV and Excel files back and forth so as to display them in a proper number format. It’s like that darned USB port, you have to flip it 3 times to get it right.

This should be the grand compromise.

The US will convert to metric, however everyone else has to convert from commas to decimal points.

Places using decimal separators and the metric system are the real winners here.

I'll celebrate for a whole week whenever the US converts to the metric system. I hope I'll still be young enough to handle it.

Since it's a big "moat" for parts manufacturing (mainly for defense industry)... I predict the USA will give up imperial units when it's empire finally collapses.

Perhaps in the next few decades as China builds its own economic sphere.

Carter started a transition to metric in the 1970s and Reagan killed it. It became a nationalist thing to keep it.

Um, it's unamerican to use "imperial" units. When you have a revolution, you have to get rid of all things imperial!

Therefore US pints are 16oz, not 20oz, and so on for most fluid measures (fluid ounces are based on dry ounces, which are avoirdupois, not imperial).

We kept linear measurements the same (feet, yard, miles). So it's a bit of a stretch to say we're not imperial. I'd say it's "US imperial".

I was about to comment that feet, yards and miles are not imperial measure; but I checked, and WP says they are in fact imperial units. So i learned something today.

Growing up in Switzerland with a dot as the decimal separator, I newer knew just how much of an outlier we are in this part of the world until now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...

We also use apostrophe as the thousands separator, so: 1'234'567.89 which I personally always found much more readable that using commas and dots. Is there any other country that uses this combination?

No missed rule. Thank you for your feedback. I have replaced the decimal separators '.' with ','. Sorry for the confusion.

While OP here made a mistake, some countries use mixed systems depending on what it is used for . Switzerland for example uses comma for normal numbers and dot for currency alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Examples_of_...

Did the the ocean influence the ease of expansion of the explosion? Or hinder it? We are comparing an underwater explosion to one on land, and I'm wondering if it's directly comparable.

From what I've read it seems that the ocean exacerbated the explosion: the hot magma caused water to vaporize and created a steam explosion. I've read about a 70x volume expansion and that the top altitude of the plume was steam.

On the other hand, the ocean might have captured some of the ash (?)

This reminds me of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, which was the first adult book I ever read. It featured a catastrophic underwater volcanic explosion. Great book, it’s a Robinson Crusoe-style sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Interestingly, Verne wrote the book nine years before the Krakatoa explosion. He must have been thinking of Tambora, though I’m not sure that eruption was well recognized at the time.

I ran a quick bit of napkin maths a few days back here on HN.

Based on 6 MT energy release, a maximum of 11 million tonnes (or 11 million m^3) of water could have been vapourised.

Liquid-to-gas expansion is on the order of 1,000 times, not 70x. This would be 11 km^3 of expansion.

If the erruption yield was higher, and I've seen values of up to 50 MT suggested, the amounts would be roughly 9x greater: 100 million tonnes and 100 km^3 of steam.

All of this is very rough and is strictly based on the quantity of energy and the heat of vapourisation of water. Actual quantity of water/steam is likely lower. There's no geology involved in the estimate, just physics.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019044

I'm curious if this would cause a noticeable change in the pH of those waters, and if that could be a good basis for estimating how much ash was captured.

I wonder how many tonnes of fish got destroyed, cooked, or otherwise thrown many kilometers into the air.

I was thinking that too about whales and birds. Some species are found only on/around an island or two, like many of the Galapagos species.

At least for once humans were not to blame :)

That sounds delicious

I wonder if all that steam condensing would also help contain the ash. If it was that much steam I guess as it cooled it "rained"?

It should have also significantly reduced the temperature of the resulting ash cloud which reduced the quantity of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere. Which presumably reduces how much short term global cooling you get from the eruption.

For western US trained geoscientists, the Bishop Tuff [1] (from the ~750,000 years ago eruption of the Long Valley Caldera, near Mammoth Mtn. in California) is a "modern" comparable ashfall deposit.

This was quite a bit larger (edited to add: I meant in areal extent, not necc. volume erupted).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Tuff

I was vacationing in Mammoth one time and started reading about the geology... quite a shock to find that basically everything to the east is a giant caldera [1]. Also 760,000 years ago is really quite recent on geologic time scales.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Valley_Caldera

That's about the same size as the Henry's Fork Caldera [0] which is within the much larger Island Park Caldera [1], both produced by the Yellowstone hot spot. The Island Park Caldera is one of the largest in the world.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_Fork_Caldera [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Park_Caldera

Wondering if any ships were destroyed by the eruption the scale makes me think there had to be?

Could Volcano eruptions be Earth's way of stabilizing climate change? i.e. sea water gets warmer and is no longer keeping the eruptions from occurring. Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere?

I'm no expert but I can't think of many reasons for a boat to be there.

I remember reading about that Malaysian flight that got lost few years ago in the indian ocean and apparently this area is so uncommon that the closest ships are often more than 1 thousand kilometers away.

The only ships that could be there would be local, but there was an eruption and tsunami alert issued the day before, so I guess that would only leave ships doing work related to the volcano itself.

> Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere?

Interesting, this prompted me to read[1] into how it works and made me interested in why we don't pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to help cool down the planet and buy us more time to transition off of CO2/CH4 emitting processes? Is it cost prohibitive? We already cloud seed pretty often so there's infrastructure in place for a large scale operation?

[1] https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/how-v...

"But there are at least 27 reasons why stratospheric geoengineering may be a bad idea. These include disruption of the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people; ozone depletion; no more blue skies; reduction of solar power; and rapid global warming if it stops, with devastating impacts on natural ecosystems. "

https://cires.colorado.edu/events/stratospheric-sulfur-geoen...

Because ocean acidification is also a problem and we wouldn’t actually follow through and reduce emissions with the borrowed time.

I've just finished reading "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson, which explores this very concept.

acid rains are no joke either.

This looks like a tedious process that I would have totally done on my own had I thought of it. By that I mean the painstaking process of matting out each frame, then randomly placing it on places of the map, just because I could, just for the lulz. I'm not discounting it as "i could have thought of that", but appreciation for how useful it actually is.

Some people cannot grasp certain things without visuals, and this visual is one of those that definintely makes things clearer.

How about this tool?

https://evergiven-everywhere.glitch.me/

Granted, it's the Evergiven, but how hard would it be to exchange the image?

You can choose the 2022 Tonga eruption example on the tool. https://www.leventhalmap.org/projects/insizeor/

Oh, nice! Moving around gives a really good feeling for map projection too.

I like they handle the relational scaling for you as you zoom in/out. I was disappointed at not seeing an option for scaling, but nodded appreciation with "it just works" aspect

Sure, that's fun. That has been taken much further than I would have bothered by just placing a cutout on maps and saving those images. Somebody had an idea, and just didn't stop, and took it to that level. My modern day level of "cleverness" would have stopped well before thinking, "ooh, integrate into a live website". That is clever and allows others to share in the fun.

FWIW:

* I think visuals are great for illumination overall, some people not withstanding :)

* I think they also used semi-transparent shadow

Yes, they did use transparent shadows. You can tell because the images are not GIF's, they're actually a sequence of PNG images overlayed atop other PNG images. There's the base satellite image of the area, then the frames-of-explosion-with-transparency overlayed atop them. You can confirm this by right clicking on the image and choosing "open image in new tab", which will (usually) open this final frame in a new tab.

[0] - https://graphics.reuters.com/TONGA-VOLCANO/lgpdwjyqbvo/cdn/i...

I tried to save one of the "gifs" to share with a friend and was quite upset that I found myself with a png. Interesting technique. Do you think this was done to have better quality animated images? GIF compression isn't amazing (relative to WebM at least)

Very gratified they didn’t just post these as rendered gifs.

Imagine the social media scare you could generate in a year or so after everyone has forgotten about this eruption by sharing a graphics.reuters.com URL for one of these animations that appears to show a satellite image sequence of a massive mushroom cloud obliterating the Korean Peninsula or the Sinai with a breathless ‘LOOK WHAT REUTERS JUST REPORTED!!!’ caption.

It’s really important for reputable sources posting images to think about the fake news potential of them getting shared out of context.

I mean, they could have used APNG at this point. https://caniuse.com/apng

Doesn't compress stuff like that super well but no worse than a sequence of PNGs.

I feel if you're gonna use JS animation anyway, you could just use 2 jpegs, one for masking and a canvas.

Hm. Webp is doing darn well these days too. https://caniuse.com/webp

Avif isn't an option yet.

Probably more along the line of they have some library that uses PNG sequences. Maybe even as simple as a slideshow with short durations. It's a newsy site. They don't have a lot of control over what their CMS/publishing platform can do. Someone probably had a clever idea on how to use something existing in a way not envisioned when created.

Yeah I agree! I knew the eruption was big (being able to clearly see it from space), but those visuals 1) make me remember how big the Pacific is, 2) how much bigger the eruption was than I originally thought, when overlaid on somewhere I know the relative size of (such as Florida).

Yeah, seeing things above the ocean like that removes human relatable scale. Putting it over land masses that humans can relate changes everything.

Now, imagine the struggle with searching for a lost airplane in those same waters. Approaches impossible

It definitely does.

I agree. Not exactly the same, but I live on the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan, and every year/summer, it claims the lives of many people (mainly swimmers). I've watched coast guard helicopters, drones, boats cover (what seems to be) every foot of the few square miles the person was last seen, and still be unsuccessful at finding the missing person. Unimaginable scale when compared to the Pacific!

I'd like to see what it would have looked like on Mars.

What I'm curious about is whether this was equivalent to, or larger than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa

Also whether it will turn the sky red for months.

My understanding is it's smaller even than Pinatubo, which happened in living memory, and significantly smaller than Krakatoa.

Peak power is roughly equivalent to that of Pinatubo apparently. The main difference is the duration, which was much longer for Pinatubo.

Krakatoa is estimated at 200 MT energy, this was estimated as 6 MT.

The 6-10MT estimate is really a lower bound based on the amount of material moved from the island. A more reliable estimate is based on the overpressure, which was significantly larger than the Tsar Bomba (also exploded over an island) which was 50MT. https://text.npr.org/1074438703

That said, the amount of SO2 was fairly low, so the climate impact not likely to be large.

Any idea if this will have a measurably effect on climate change?

I heard from an Anton Petrov video it would reduce the planets average temperature by half a degree for some time, but I don't know where he got that info from.

It's possible that estimate was based on the eruption size, not the SO2 amount. It seems that the amount of SO2 emitted wasn't that much, so maybe something much less than 0.5 degF.

That is absolutely mind-boggling.

Mount Tambora is estimated to have been about 33GT. That one messed up weather globally for two years.

And it's suspected to have had an impact on Napoleons Waterloo disaster by changing the weather...

We have had really beautiful sunsets here in Northern California for the past week. Maybe related? (We also have a winter wildfire in Big Sur that could be contributing.)

Nah, the ash cloud went westwards towards Australia.

The estimate is about 20x smaller

I think if there was another Krakatoa, it would eclipse Covid in the news cycle for weeks.

The animation with it placed over Florida helped me understand, but also gave me a really good idea...

No need to take action, Florida Man is on the job!

Is this expected to have a global climate impact?

The Wikipedia page[1] for the event says a temporary drop of 0.1-0.5 degrees C for the next 12-15 months.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga_eruption_and_...

Is this a net 'good thing' for global human life because it will counterbalance anthropogenic climate change?

(Probably still a significant net harm to Tongans I'd imagine :-( )

To what extent are the particles kicked up into the atmosphere a problem for life? Are they carcinogenic or respiratory risks?

I doubt it; it's a short-lived effect and probably doesn't really fall outside the normal range of year-to-year temperature variances.

No, it wasn't dense enough.

https://www.ecowatch.com/volcano-eruptions-hunga-tonga-clima...

Most of Tonga is covered in ash. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60065767

Globally event appears unlikely to have a significant cooling effect on temperatures globally, h

>"However, to date, it injected 'only' 0.4 Tg (400,000 tonnes) of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which is not enough to result in significant surface cooling for this individual eruption. "Unless further eruptive activity occurs, we should not detect significant surface cooling. At present, hazards related to ash fallout are really the number one concern."

https://news.abs-cbn.com/spotlight/01/19/22/explainer-tonga-...

Local environmental harm: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/tongas-volcanic...

Will this have a cooling effect on the Earth this year? I seem to remember global temperatures fell after the big one in the Philippines.

The amount of sulfur injected into the atmosphere was quite small compared to the explosion of Pinatubo

Yes about .5deg

This is amazing, and superimposing it over other land masses really helps to illustrate the point. I think it would be incredibly helpful to compare it to interstellar events from comets, especially to the (supposed) impact of the comet from Don't Look Up...

Curious if this will cause a slight cooling of the earth's air temperature due to increased volcanic particles in the air. I had no idea of the size of this eruption and it looks absolutely enormous based on this article. It didn't mention how many metric tons were ejected into the atmosphere

Here is an article saying that after a eruption the air temperature rapidly cools for a while. Lets hope this doesn't wreck crop production.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/volcanoes-cooled-...

Not this time apparently.

> Pinatubo erupted for several days, sending about 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, or upper atmosphere. There, the gas combined with water to create aerosol particles that reflected and scattered some of the sun’s rays, keeping them from hitting the surface. That had the effect of cooling the atmosphere by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (about half a degree Celsius) for several years. (It is also the mechanism of a controversial form of geoengineering: using planes or other means to continuously inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to intentionally cool the planet.)

> But the Hunga eruption lasted only about 10 minutes, and satellite sensors in the days that followed measured about 400,000 tons of sulfur dioxide reaching the stratosphere. “The amount of SO2 released is much, much smaller than, say, Mount Pinatubo,” said Michael Manga, an earth sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So unless the Hunga eruption resumes and continues at a similarly strong level, which is considered unlikely, it won’t have a global cooling effect.

- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/climate/scientists-tonga-...

The gif time-lapse gives me some anxiety - it reminds me of the Sega game Space Harrier where the enemies come at you quickly, within a few frames.

And it still wasn't big enough to put sufficient sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere to have a noticeable cooling effect. Too bad :(

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60088413

Too bad? It would be extremely cool for one summer, ruining crops and causing famines and then back to hotter summers from next year onwards. How does that help anyone?

You are describing an extreme cooling effect. If the Tonga eruption produced merely a mild cooling effect, it could contribute to the energy balance. Buying another year of frozen permafrost sounds ok to me.

Where are you when we need you, Rodney Dangerfield?

https://tmi.papost.org/the-pepsi-syndrome-saturday-night-liv...

Dr. Edna Casey: It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [ camera zooms in on Dr. Edna Casey ] The amazing colossal president.

Rosalynn Carter: Well how big is he?

Dr. Edna Casey: Well Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?

[ Rodney Dangerfield enters ] Rodney Dangerfield: How do you do, how are you?

Ross Denton: Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?

Rodney Dangerfield: Oh, he’s a big guy, I’ll tell you that, he’s a big guy. I tell you he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!

Rosalynn Carter: Oh my God! Jimmy! Oh God!

Rodney Dangerfield: Oh, he’s big, I’ll tell you that, boy. He’s so big that when two girls make love to him at the same time, they never meet each other! He’s a big guy, I’ll tell you!

Rosalynn Carter: Oh no! Oh Jimmy! My Jimmy!

Rodney Dangerfield: I don’t want to upset you lady, he’s big, you know what I mean? Why he could have an affair with the Lincoln Tunnel! I mean, he’s really high! He’s big, I’ll tell you! He’s a big guy!

Rosalynn Carter: No! No! No!

Ross Denton: Rodney, thank you very much. You can go.

Rodney Dangerfield: It’s my pleasure. He’s way up there, lady! you know what I mean? [ goes off, leaving Rosalynn Carter very upset ]

I have been reading Termination shock by Neal Stephenson and this eruption reminded me of the main plot in tat book - injecting sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reduce heating. It will be interesting to track the effect of this eruption downwind.

Someone else estimated the Tonga explosion at 10 megatons [1] and it was heard thousands of miles away. Bear in mind, humans have detonated nuclear weapons larger than this, most famously the Tsar Bomba [2] at 50 megatons. Compare this to something not that long ago: Krakatoa, estimated at 200 megatons [3].

Then compare this to the Year Without Summer (536 AD) [4]:

> Falling in the time known as the 'Dark Ages', the year 536 AD fully embraced this moniker as Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia were plunged into 24-hour darkness for 18 months. Summer temperatures plummeted between 1.5-2.5°C causing crops to fail and millions to starve to death.

All of this has happened in the last 10,000 years, which is regarded as a relatively stable period and a mere blink of the eye in cosmic timelines. I'm reminded of the thin blue line [5]. You begin to realize how narrow a niche we live in.

Humanity almost died out 70,000 years ago [6]. It's not really known why. There are lots of theories on the cause. It's estimated the population dropped into the tens of thousands. It's actually a big reason why there is little genetic diversity in humans (compared to other primates, for example).

Far worse has happened on Earth and will likely happen again: the Chicxulub impact, supervolcanic eruptions like Yellowstone (about every 700,000 years in recent times), the magnetic poles flipping (and what that'll do to solar radiation hitting the Earth) and so on.

And all of these pale into comparison to any space-based cataclysmic events (eg gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, magnatars, neutron star and black hole mergers).

It really makes you think how fragile our existence is.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/18/1073800454/nasa-scientists-es...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa#:~:text=With%20an%20e...

[4]: https://www.history.co.uk/articles/what-was-the-worst-year-i...

[5]: http://lightexhibit.org/earth_atmosphere.html#:~:text=Earth'....

[6]: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...

Maybe interesting, I keep a list of large energy events/stores for thinking about the scale of global catastrophes.

Looks like this Tonga eruption is VEI5 or 6, so between St Helens and Pinatubo.

Comments appreciated in the doc!

- Mt. Toba 74kya, VEI 8/M8.8 eruption energy: 1e21-1e22 Joules

- M8 Volcanoes once every million years, but M7 yield > 10x more energy over time.

- Global Warming: 7.88e21 Joule/year

- Hiawatha Crater (Pleistocene, possibly 12kya) impact energy: 3e21 J

- Hurricane (1% kinetic, 99% latent heat): 1e21 J

- Human energy production 2013: 5.7e20 J/year

- Mt. Tambora 1815, VEI 7 eruption energy: 1.3e20 J

- Largest earthquakes 2: 1e19 J

- World nuclear weapon stockpile yield (extrapolated from USA): 16e18 J

- United States nuclear weapon stockpile yield 2020 (~2Gt TNT): 8.3e18

- Mt. Pinatubo 1991, Krakatoa 1883; VEI 6 eruption energy: 8.3e17 J

- Mt. St. Helens 1980, VEI 4 eruption energy: 1e17 J

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14EslUTRCwOgc_EobxH6X5e01...

The magnetic poles are about to flip Austin actually :) At least we know this time

I posted previously this reference: "Likely the Tonga shockwave from Buenos Aires, 10000 km from the eruption".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29949782

Apparently there were small but destructive tsunamis in the bay area from the Tonga eruption

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt_HNFI4ckY

That is huge! As someone who originally came from tropical country, volcano eruption sucks even if you live far away from it. The dust, the earthquake, tsunami warnings, etc. hopefully everyone who is affected is doing fine

Is this going to make our weather measurably colder for the next year?

It'll apparently have a slight cooling effect on the southern hemisphere[1], lasting until this spring.

[1]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/459707/tonga-eruption-co...

The article showed a great representation of what would happen if the explosion happened in other countries.

My hope of seeing video of the actual eruption and/or the associated lightning storm is slowly dwindling. :/

There's a similar image that's essentially "what if it were Mt St Helens?" .... it covers WA and OR

My indoor pressure sensors registered both eruptions (?). Iam from germany.

So are we poised for a really extended winter or depressed summer?

What's your estimation of how many megatons of TNT it was?

will the area of eruption eventually become an island?

it was a caldera explosion (hot magma + water = steam)

the island is basically gone: https://twitter.com/defis_eu/status/1483020866258714625?

The scaled images are wild.

Are we gonna have very pink dramatic sunset because of it? ( akin to Krakatoa )

world's largest boom box for sure.. that bass travelled

I would like to see, "MEDIA COVERAGE OF Tonga eruption compared as if it had happened in various Nations". Because apparently no one knows anybody who lives in Tonga with a camera, but damn that high tide at the Berkeley marina was crazy!!

Tonga's Internet connectivity was knocked out by the blast and it won't be back for a while, thus making it hard to upload pictures.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/tonga-likely-spen...

The submarine cable connecting Tonga to the world was severed. While satellite connections exist, apparently the ash cloud interfered with that as well. It has been extremely difficult/expensive to get any pictures out of Tonga.

I have a great aunt who lives in Tonga - my Grandma spoke to her a couple days ago. Apparently people on the main Island (Tongatapu) are mainly fine - her main issue is a bunch of ash on her roof, which apparently is going to cost for $500 to get removed from local tradespeople.

Pretty cool way to look at it. My take away ... Florida is almost as big as Britain? Wow, I didn't realize how small Britain was.

Yes, these images are incidentally an excellent reminder to Europeans of how big the United States is. I read a lot of criticisms of the US from people overseas that seem to rest on a lack of understanding of the scale of the country. The US is huge. A volcanic plume that covers most of Britain or Spain would only cover about half of California.

You can wrap your head around it using "Measure distance" in Google Maps and comparing some in the US to Europe. Some examples:

- ~1,200 km will take you from London to Valencia. You can fit a straight line that long just in California or Texas.

- Miami to Seattle is about as long as Gibralter to Moscow. Tronheim in the Arctic Circle is closer to Cairo than Seattle is to Miami.

- Paris is closer to Tehran than San Diego is to Bangor.

Bit similar to how everyone misunderstands the size of Africa. Here's a nice toy to play around with for a couple of hours: https://thetruesize.com

So it makes sense to compare the US to Europe as a continent. Got it. What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US?

> What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US?

The main one is just not understanding how difficult transit and logistics is here. I've heard British people complain that we should just put high speed passenger rail all across the country like they did while not realizing that their country is literally 1% of the size of the US and more than ten times the population density.

The most sadly hilarious one I see fairly often is Europeans planning vacations to the states and intending to drive across the country in a few days so they can see all the big landmarks on the east and west coasts. It takes a lot longer than they realize.

> What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US?

My guess would be population density. The US has ~330M people, Europe has ~748M.

US is more dense though (going by www.worldometers.info). I think these explanations “why we can’t have good things” are too simplistic. Ignore rail and fiber for a second, and look at commuter air travel for example: European market is much more competitive and prices are much lower than for comparable flights in the US.

I think you should double check, that sounds reversed. US and Europe have similar area but Europe has quite a lot more people.

Yeah, Europe is way, way more dense.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+USA...

United States | 36 people/km^2

Europe | 104 people/km^2

Huh. I wonder where this data is from: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula... “The population density in Europe is 34 per Km^2”

Edit: duh. They included all of Russia as “Europe”. I stand corrected.

I find the EU is a better frame of reference for the US than any given country is.

Yes. And to put it in further perspective, the entire EU is still only 43% of the area of the US.

Have you ever looked at how big earth is relative to Jupiter to the sun? And how far each one of them truly are from each other? We're terrible at sense of scale :)

… or how big Florida is.

I already knew the size of Florida :)

https://mapfight.xyz/map/gb/#us.fl

Britain is 1.7 times larger: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/flor...)

As an American who enjoys soccer, it's crazy when you then overlay the entire football pyramid onto Britain. I don't see how USA soccer (MLS, grassroots, lower leagues ect...) could ever be like the "ideal" of how things are done on the other side of the ocean.

As another comparison, the UK is just slightly smaller than Oregon. But has 16 times as many people.

The title is ungrammatical and refers to "states" where the article does not.

Write a better tittle and I’ll change it.

By the way for me Spain, Florida or UK are states, how you call them?

You should have used the article's original title, because it was neither misleading nor linkbait. I've reverted it now.

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the article does not refer to "Nations" either (the phrase used in the Reuters text is "well-known land masses"). title nitpicking is one of the worst things about HN (and there are many things wrong with this site), imo just use the original title.

Tonga eruption as if it had* happened in various nations

Edited, thanks a lot for the correction! English is not my first language!

just so you know, you are correct to call Florida and California "states."

Interesting; on aside, I would call:

Florida - State

Ontario - Province

Spain & UK - "Country" colloquially; might use the term "Nation" if I needed to be more inclusive/ambiguous

(Understanding that formally, State might in fact be a better term: e.g. it's "Minister of the State" or "Statesmanship" etc; but this is how I'd use them in daily life. ESL, 25 years in Canada FWIW)

State and Country are used interchangeably. The United States, before the Civil War was just that, a union of self governing entities. A nation is a group of similar peoples such as the Nation of Islam or Navajo Nation.

Country and State are synonymous terms that both apply to self-governing political entities. A nation, however, is a group of people who share the same culture but do not have sovereignty.

https://www.infoplease.com/world/diplomacy/state-country-and...

https://www.thoughtco.com/country-state-and-nation-1433559

I interpreted the question to be about common/colloquial usage, not definition.

In colloquial usage, for me, state and country are not typically used interchangeably, and are fairly asymmetrical: i.e. I'd never call Nebraska a Country. I'd much more commonly call Netherlands a country, and only call it a state in formal political discussion.

Everybody's mileage will vary significantly :)

Also poster apparently means US states, not like physical states of a system.

> Also poster apparently means US states, not like physical states of a system.

I think the article means "state" in the sense of "country," not US State.

Okay okay, I changed States in Nations, better now?

I fear you will soon learn that nation is not capitalized and strictly speaking refers to a group of people, not a geographical region.

I changed “states” to “States”, I thought it was obvious

No, if you check the article, poster means sovereign states, or what in US is called “countries”. There is not a single example of a state in USA.

There's one of Florida and one of California.

These are totally memeable gifs

Reminds me of the “problem solved” pictures

California, Florida, the Koreas, Israel, Somalia?

These are totally intentional examples for the memes aka for the lulz

I’m saving all these before other people notice

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