The eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano in Tongawas more powerful than the largest nuclear explosion in the United States, according to a simulation of the megatsunami produced after the explosion.

This volcano’s 15 megaton volcanic explosion _one of the largest natural explosions in more than a century_, generated a megatsunami with waves up to 45 meters high along the coast of Tofua Island in Tonga and waves of up to 17 meters in Tongatapu, the country’s most populous island.

Researchers at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School used a combination of before and after satellite imagery, drone mapping and field observations collected by scientists at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as well as data from the Khaled bin Sultan Foundation for Living Oceans World Reef Expedition to to develop a tsunami simulation in the Tongan archipelago.

The results, which are published in Scientific progressshowed how the complex shallow bathymetry of the region acted as a low velocity wave fall, capturing a tsunami lasting over an hour with waves up to 85 meters high a minute after the initial explosion.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai submarine volcanic eruption, which forms the Tongan island chain and is the result of the convergence of the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates, rivaled the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, which killed more than 36,000 people came.

“Despite its size and long duration, the mega-tsumani that emerged from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai claimed few livessaid Sam Purkis, professor and chief of the Department of Marine Geosciences at Rosenstiel School.

The simulation also suggested that the eruption’s location in relation to urban centers may have saved Tonga from a worse outcome, it describes. Europe Press.

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While 2022 may have been a happy departure, other submarine volcanoes have the potential to generate a similarly sized tsunami in the future,” Purkis warned.

“This eruption holds important lessons for past and future tsunamis in Tonga and beyond. The eruption was an excellent natural laboratory to test hypotheses and models that can be deployed elsewhere to improve future disaster preparedness, and to better understand similar eruptions and subsequent tsunamis preserved in antiquity and the geological record.” specialist. )