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Mr. Titanic wrote:Hello grodog. I'll forward your question to Charlie. Welcome!

grodog wrote:

Mr. Titanic wrote:Hello grodog. I'll forward your question to Charlie. Welcome!

Any updates?

Allan.

Tennie wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 6:56 pm Well, this may be a few years late, but just over a week ago a fascinating event took place in the Tonga island chain in the South Pacific. The volcanic island of Hunga Tonga experienced what is quite likely the largest explosion ever caught on camera (and certainly the largest yet seen from space). The shockwave from the explosion was tracked not only by weather stations on Earth, but also visible on satellite. Here's a couple of pretty good videos that look at the eruption and its immediate aftermath:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZZVVwqZ0rs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLHzFz2zytE

Also, here's a set of interesting articles looking at the island, its eruptive history, and a possible (preliminary) scenario as to the cause of this particular eruption:

https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-vei-5-m ... nga-tonga/
https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-hunga-tonga-explosion/
https://www.volcanocafe.org/hunga-tonga ... ity-event/

Of course, I doubt that there was any video taken from the surface of this eruption (though there is video of a much smaller eruption that occurred the previous day), or at least, any that actually survived what happened next (for reasons that should be obvious). Then again, Tonga's Internet connections were cut off in the immediate aftermath of the big blast, and it's been taking some time to get them back up and running again, so who knows at this point...

Regardless, the imagery and data already coming out does give a better image of that it must've been like to witness, say, Krakatau's 1883 eruption, or Thera's 1628 B.C. eruption, especially from the vantage point of Earth orbit!

In addition, here's another article with a rather intriguing thesis:

https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-great-a ... aniakchak/

Basically, it suggests that the Minoans (and arguably the rest of the ancient world) actually suffered an especially unlucky one-two punch, with Thera's eruption in their own backyard occurring approximately the same year (give or take) as another similarly-sized eruption of Aniakchak in Alaska! The author of the article dug through various records (ice cores, dendrochronology, etc.) and found this connection to be a very likely one.

Charlie P., if you're reading this, I recommend checking out not only those articles that I linked, but the source site (Volcano Cafe: https://www.volcanocafe.org/ ) as well. There's a wealth of information there that could be quite useful should you either do a future update of some of your volcano-related books (e.g. Unearthing Atlantis and Ghosts of Vesuvius), or alternately an entirely new book on the subject!