In the landmark paper by James Hansen titled “Global Warming in the Pipeline” and also in our recent Climate Emergency Forum interview, Hansen has discussed the surprising and rather unique undersea volcanic eruption in early 2022 of Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha’apai.
The upper part (caldera) of this undersea volcano is 150 meters deep; the volcano extends from the seafloor depth of 2000 meters up to within 150 meters of the surface. When the volcano erupted, it rapidly heated and vaporized a lot of sea water, and injected a plume of mostly water vapour up high into the stratosphere about 53 to 57 km high.
The water vapour injected had a volume of about 146 Tg, which is just over 10% of the entire amount of water vapour (1400 Tg) in the entire stratosphere around our planet.
That’s huge, and a big deal. When large volcanoes on-land erupt, they can send huge amounts of sulphur into the upper atmosphere, creating aerosols that can cool the planet for several years. For example the massive Pinatuba eruption in 1991 temporarily cooled the planet about 0.5C for several years.
Since the Tonga eruption was an underwater eruption, at 150 meters depth, the sulphur dioxide released to the atmosphere was nominal, and the vaporized sea water made the water vapour produced from superheated water and steam literally off the charts. Thus, the effect on climate was a temporary warming which is still ongoing, but Hansen argues in “Global Warming in the Pipeline”that it is not a huge effect.
Still, this massive eruption of an undersea volcano is a very interesting occurrence, and has fascinating science behind it.
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PS: as I upload this video it’s 11:30 pm in Ottawa, and +9 hours (8:30 am) in Dubai, the opening day for COP28. Don’t miss the speech by King Charles:)
