An Undersea Volcano Erupted With Force Of More Than 500 Hiroshima Nuclear Bombs

• An undersea volcano near Tonga erupted on Saturday with a force of more than 500 times as powerful as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.
• The chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says it was the equivalent of around 10 megatons of TNT exploding.
• Read more news about nature here.

Saturday, near the island nation of Tonga, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted so violently that it could be heard thousands of miles away in places like New Zealand and Alaska.

James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR about the blast, “We come up with a number that’s around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent.”

That would mean that the undersea volcano erupted with more than 500 times the explosive force of the “Little Boy” nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

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Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said, “This might be the loudest eruption since [the eruption of the Indonesian volcano] Krakatau in 1883.”

That volcanic eruption caused the death of approximately 36,000 people, destroyed hundreds of coastal towns and villages, and sent ash 50 miles into the sky and covered an area of 300,000 square miles, leaving the area in darkness for two and a half days.

The blast near Tonga, despite occurring 650 feet below the surface of the sea, has cut the nation off for more than three days.

Undersea communications cables appear to have been cut, and the airport is covered in ash, preventing relief flights from arriving at the capital city of Nuku’alofa.

Reconnaissance flights by the government of New Zealand showed ash had blanketed houses and many other structures. New Zealand’s Foreign Ministry reported that two people had been confirmed killed and that a tsunami had inundated the western coast of the main island of Tongatapu, causing major damage. Wire reports cite the government of Tonga claiming one additional death and even more damage on outlying islands, including Mango island, where all homes have been destroyed.

Dan Slayback, a research scientist for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano was completely destroyed by the eruption and was “so massive it even appears to have taken chunks out of the older islands nearby,” reports NPR.

The biggest mystery now, according to Michael Poland, is why with that much explosive force was the eruption actually relatively small?

“It had an outsized impact, well beyond the area that you would have expected if this had been completely above water,” he said. “That’s the thing that’s just a head-scratcher.”

Garvin said that based on “past precedent for volcanic eruptions in this kind of setting” it is unlikely we will “have another one of these explosions for a while.”