2023-12-01 07:00:12
On January 15, 2022, the eruption of the Hunga Tonga – Hunga Ha’apai volcano, located in the South Pacific, caused a shock wave felt globally and triggered tsunamis in various countries, such as Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand (New Zealand is a country in Oceania, in the southwest of the Pacific Ocean,…), Japan, Chile, Peru and the United States. This eruption had a significant impact on the composition of the stratosphere, leading to unprecedented losses in the ozone layer, up to 7% in large areas of the southern hemisphere (The southern hemisphere or southern hemisphere is half of the earth…).
These findings come from a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, carried out by researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the University (A university is a higher education institution whose objective is the…) of Maryland.
Image NASA
David Wilmouth, project scientist at SEAS and lead author of the study, highlights the exceptional aspect of this eruption, which injected around 136 million tonnes of water vapor into the normally dry stratosphere. Ross Salawitch, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and co-author of the study, notes that this is the first time in the history of satellite records that such an amount of water vapor is injected into the atmosphere (The word atmosphere can have several meanings :).
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption was the largest explosion ever recorded in the atmosphere, sending aerosols and gases deep into the stratosphere. Certain materials have even reached the lower mesosphere (The mesosphere is the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere between 50 km altitude, above…), more than 48 kilometers (The meter (symbol m, from the Greek metron, measurement) is the basic unit of length of the System…) above the surface of the Earth. Previous studies have shown that the eruption increased the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by 10% globally, with even higher concentrations in some areas of the Southern Hemisphere.
The research team, using data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) aboard NASA’s Aura satellite, not only tracked the movement of this water vapor across the globe, but also monitored the temperature (The temperature is a physical quantity measured using a thermometer and…) and the levels of chloride monoxide (ClO), ozone (O3), nitric acid (Nitric acid, sometimes called acid azotic, is a liquid chemical compound…) (HNO3), and hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the stratosphere during the following year the rash. These measurements were compared to those collected by the MLS from 2005 to 2021 before the eruption.
Image SSEC/CIMSS, University of Wisconsin–Madison
The injection of water vapor and sulfur dioxide (SO2) modified both the chemistry and the dynamics of the stratosphere. The increase in sulfate aerosols and water vapor triggered a chain of events in complex atmospheric chemistry, leading to widespread changes in concentrations many compounds, including ozone. The additional water vapor also had a cooling effect in the stratosphere, leading to a change in traffic, which led to decreases in ozone in the southern hemisphere and an increase in ozone in the tropics.
The research team plans to continue studying the volcano’s impact through 2023 and beyond, as water vapor moves from the tropics and mid-latitudes toward the pole of the Southern Hemisphere, where it has the potential to amplify ozone losses in Antarctica. Water vapor is expected to remain high in the stratosphere for several years.
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