Imagine an explosion a hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. That is the amount of energy that Nasa estimated was unleashed by the sudden eruption of the volcano in Tonga on January 15. “The amount of energy released by the eruption was equivalent to somewhere between 4 to 18 megatons of TNT,” Jim Garvin at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre said.
The explosion obliterated the volcanic island of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, triggered destructive tsunami waves, covered nearby islands with ash and blasted a shockwave around the world. The eruption also shot material so high it may have reached 55km or more above the Earth’s surface, punching through the stratosphere into the rarefied mesosphere close to the edge of space. Although only a small