We are seeing pretty good sunrises down under.

this morning

felltoearth wrote:Ha! This just popped up in my memories on FB. Joke from 9 years ago:

Did you hear the one about the Bucky Ball who was lonely so he signed up with a carbon dating service?


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I bet he spent half his life trying to get a date.

Just took a more in depth look at this.

Take a look at this satellite photo of the ash cloud. Using Google Maps to estimate the distance between the main island of Tonga and Tubou, I'm taking a figure of 200 km as the diameter of that ash cloud. So that ash cloud, when that photo was taken, was covering an area of around 31,000 square kilometres.

You're looking at an ash cloud the size of Belgium.

UPDATE:

According to this report, the ash cloud had reached Queensland in Australia earlier today. Which means that some of that ash has now travelled around 1,500 km west.

Well no more hottest year records for a little while.

Early data suggests the eruption was the biggest blast since Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines 30 years ago, New Zealand-based volcanologist Shane Cronin told Radio New Zealand.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/tonga-vol ... -1.6317364

wow

Cripes, it was almost completely shredded. That might explain the ash cloud I suppose?

Alan C wrote:Cripes, it was almost completely shredded. That might explain the ash cloud I suppose?

That's usually the contents of the Magma Chamber. Imagine a Cola bottle having more Cola slowly pumped into it until the lid breaks. The Cola fizzes up in the air (and solidifies into ash in the case of the Volcano) and what's left of the lid goes with it.

BlackBart wrote:

Alan C wrote:Cripes, it was almost completely shredded. That might explain the ash cloud I suppose?

That's usually the contents of the Magma Chamber. Imagine a Cola bottle having more Cola slowly pumped into it until the lid breaks. The Cola fizzes up in the air (and solidifies into ash in the case of the Volcano) and what's left of the lid goes with it.

What's happening is that as the magma rises toward the surface, some components (water and carbon dioxide, mainly) dissolved in the magma at higher pressure (this is where the coca cola analogy best fits) begin to come out of solution and form bubbles. This alone is not enough to create the runaway process of an explosive eruption. Yes, the bottle fizzes over when the volume due to the bubbles increases enough. When the volume fraction of bubbles in the magma is sufficiently large, then the top of the column of magma begins to fragment as the pressure of gas inside the bubbles (inherited from deeper in the column) blows the top of the column apart and up out of the conduit. The removal of this mass accelerates the depressurization of the column further down and the exsolution and fragmentation front propagates rapidly downward into the magma column. This is a positive feedback catastrophe, and the eruption continues until the system re-equilibrates at a lower partial pressure of dissolved volatiles. The comparison of the explosive style with the more quiescent style of basaltic volcanoes as in Hawaii turns on the relative viscosities of the non-volatile components of magma. Bet you're glad you asked.

newolder wrote:Cito's description^ gels well with a 3-D model of the volcano posted to Reddit but later deleted that shows the destroyed crater rim is but a small fraction of the whole. This static image store shows the image but the text is unreadable here and ctrl+ or cmd+ is required for zooming...

That's right. As eruptions go, the best metric is cubic kilometers of volume erupted. The magma chamber volume often dwarfs the above land/sea volcanic edifice, which is usually just the accumulation of a lot of really tiny eruptions. Krakatoa and Toba were big, for sure, but the real giants are what once lay beneath the Yellowstone or Long Valley (CA) calderas.

Bigger than I thought. 10 Megaton explosion ...

Good article

Quirks & Quarks
Tonga volcano triggered record-breaking lightning and a never-before-seen tsunami

One of the most violent explosions in the South Pacific in centuries will be studied for years

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jan-20- ... -1.6322259