The eruption blasted up to 3 billion tons of water vapor into the atmosphere in just one hour.

On Wednesday, New Zealand and Tongan scientists confirmed that the 2022 Hunga volcano eruption in Tonga released a record-breaking steam plume, triggering far-reaching and unexpected climate impacts, driven not by sulfur, but by water vapor.

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Researchers, staff, and students from the University of Auckland have been collaborating with Tongan partners to explore the broader impacts of submarine volcanism in the Southwestern Pacific, following the Hunga eruption, the most powerful volcanic event of the modern era.

The research showed the submarine eruption blasted up to 3 billion tons of water vapor into the atmosphere in just one hour, sending moisture more than 57 km into the stratosphere and mesosphere, the highest volcanic plume ever recorded.

“Submarine volcanism has previously been overlooked in global climate studies, because there is typically not much atmospheric sulphur dioxide released,” said Shane Cronin, the study’s co-lead author and volcanologist at the University of Auckland.

Meanwhile, unlike land-based eruptions like 1991’s Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which cooled the planet via sulfur aerosols, Hunga’s deep-sea explosion saw around 20 million tons of sulfur injected directly into the ocean at depths of 300-1,100 meters, minimizing its impact in the air but raising new questions about undersea emissions and ocean chemistry, Cronin said.

The eruption also caused a deadly tsunami and damaged critical infrastructure across Tonga, highlighting the underestimated climate influence of submarine volcanism, said the study published in Nature Geoscience.

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Source: Xinhua

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