Hunga Tonga Volcano Eruption Update; The Island and its Volcano are Gone

[YoshidaYui]

[2naSalit]

1. Very informative, thanks!

[L. Coyote]

2. How big was the Tonga eruption?

I just posted in GD:

How big was the Tonga eruption?

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. That's very impressive.

Wa. is my home state, so I can easily see how massive the cloud was.

The Mt. St.Helens cloud covered the Eastern Wa. area, and of course continued to spread east across the rest of the country, over time, and thinned out.

No one had a clue half the mountain top would blow away. I guess there is no law that prevents Mt. Rainer from being as big as Tonga...or even bigger.

[L. Coyote]

4. The Cascades are a subduction zone just like Tonga.

The last really immense eruption in the Cascades, blowing the top off Mt. Mazama and creating Crater Lake, was on this scale, cloud wise. Seven thousand years ago, Mt. Mazama erupted 14 cubic miles of magma, far more than Tonga (so far). This will happen again in the Cascades, we just don't know when.

I lived in Portland metro during the big eruption, and the mind-boggling immense cloud was way off in the distance, 70 km away and maybe 20 km wide at most instead of 300 km. Wind carried the ash to the Dakotas and yes, the sky went dark 150 km to the east. Fortunately, I slept in that morning instead of going to the mountain for more photos.

Link to tweet

[GB_RN]

5. When, Not If, Rainier Goes Up...

That's going to be a disaster and a half. The explosion, even if it's just a small one will melt a shitton of snow and the resulting mudslides? I'm glad I don't live near there. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who do and they won't get a lot of warning before all that mud and other crap comes rushing down the slopes...

As a side note, I had a great aunt who lived in Seattle at the time of the Mt. St Helens explosion in 1980 (was the day after my youngest brother's 1st birthday, which is how I remember it). She brought back a bottle of ash back for me, which I still have to this day. My own son, who loves volcanoes is fascinated by that little pill bottle of gray powder. lol

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. I was in Seattle then also.

Lived high enuff to see the plume. I had been fretting about ash getting into my car engine, and was thankful that the wind prediction had changed. So we all sat in front of tv and watched Yakima get the ash.

[GB_RN]

8. Lol

While not wishing harm on anyone, there's nothing like surviving the near miss and being able to sit there and say, "Better them than us!" 😉

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. Yeah...real bag of mixed feelings.

[love_katz]

6. That is excellent.

Thank you for posting this.