NASA Scientists Estimate Tonga Blast at 10 Megatons
January 19th, 2022Via: NPR:
NASA researchers have an estimate of the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga.
“We come up with a number that’s around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent,” James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR.
That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.
The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
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