[Rockhounds] Volcano Set Off by Explosion With Force of 'Five Underground Nuclear Bombs'

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano may have been triggered by the
release of underground energy totaling as much as five nukes exploding all
at once, scientists have found.

Until this discovery, described in a paper in the journal Geophysical
Research Letters,
<https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109442> we
didn't really know what had sparked the powerful eruption. Seismic records
reveal that this immense amount of energy was built up in rock under the
ocean floor because of building gas pressure, which was all released at
once in a huge explosion.

"Our findings confirm there was an explosion, possibly due to a
gas-compressed rock, which released energy that equated to five of the
largest underground nuclear explosions conducted by North Korea in 2017,"
study co-author Jinyin Hu, a Ph.D. student at Australian National
University, said in a statement.

"Our model suggests the event resulted from the gas-compressed rock being
trapped underneath a shallow sea, like an overcooked pressure cooker," Hu
said. "This would be surprising to many because it had been commonly
thought that the interaction of hot magma with cold seawater caused such
massive underwater volcanic eruptions."

https://www.newsweek.com/hunga-tonga-volcano-eruption-triggered-underground-explosion-1962706