A volcano goes boom!

15 January 2022

Just wow. This morning, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai, a volcano in the Pacific not too far from the island nation of Tonga, erupted violently. The subsequent destabilization and shockwaves have resulted in tsunami warnings issued for parts of the Pacific and much of the US west coastline¹.

However, the marvels of modern technology mean we have a front-row seat to some of this magnificent though incredibly devastating natural occurrence. The Himawari 8, a Japanese weather satellite orbiting nearly 37 thousand kilometers, captured the explosion (see tweet below).

View post on imgur.com

Images are courtesy of @SpaceRef on Twitter

The first image in the carousel is of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai (Dec 02, 2013) and is courtesy of Landsat 8 satellite (Bands: 2, 3, 4, 8) & USGS. Data processed by Paul Quast. The second image is an image taken from Google Maps of the same region (Jan 15, 2022). ↩