Depth of the underwater Tonga volcano

Mark Doman and Alex Palmer, for ABC News, show the depth of the Tonga volcano that erupted earlier this year with a 3-D model. “While the depth of the caldera shocked him, the fact the rest of the volcano appeared to be largely unchanged was equally as surprising.”

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Scale of the Tonga eruption

Manas Sharma and Simon Scarr used satellite imagery to show the scale of the Tonga eruption, which spurted a 24-mile cloud that grew to 400 miles in diameter in an hour. Notice the little Manhattan in the bottom left corner in the image above.

However, instead of leaving it at that, Sharma and Scarr animated the eruption over familiar geographic areas to better see how big it was. The cloud was big enough to cover whole countries.

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Global ripple effect from underwater volcano

An underwater volcano erupted about 40 miles off the coast of the main island of Tonga. Using infrared data from the GOES satellite operated by NOAA, Mathew Barlow animated the ripple from the the source to around the world.

The filtered view, which shows band 13 data from the satellite’s sensors, typically to view cloud cover, is really something.

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All the volcano eruptions

Slowly becoming the person who charts the past century of natural disaster events, Lazaro Gamio for Axios uses a pictogram to depict all known volcano eruptions since 1883. The vertical position represents elevation, color represents number of eruptions since 1883, and the shape represents volcano type.

I wonder if you get anything out of looking at eruptions over time. This view is more compendium than pattern revealer. You can grab the data from the Global Volcanism Program to check it out yourself.

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Giant’s Causeway

Legend has it that Irish giant Finn MacCool built a causeway across the water from Ireland to Scotland to challenge Scottish giant Benandonner to a duel. Before the duel, Finn tricked Benandonner into thinking he was a much larger giant by pretending to be a baby. Benandonner feared the enormous size of an opponent that would have a baby that big, and quickly retreated to Scotland, demolishing the causeway behind him to keep Finn away. Remnants of this Giant’s Causeway remain along the coast of Northern Ireland.

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Giants_causeway_closeupOf course the structures that resemble the cobblestone ramp to a causeway are not really built by giants. They’re basalt pillars, most of them hexagonal, created by fast-cooling lava over 50 million years ago, when volcanoes were active in what is now Britain and Ireland.

The basalt pillars of Giant’s Causeway reach high out of the water and really look like they’re part of a purpose-built structure. You can’t really blame people for coming up with giant legends in the absence of other explanations, but even now that we know that the basalt pillars are really remnants of more than 50 million year old volcanic activity, myths are still being propagated. In 2012, when the new Giant’s Causeway visitor centre opened, one of its audio exhibits mentioned that Creationist’s believe that the Causeway was not older than 6000 years. They have since removed the audio, to avoid confusion. Everyone agrees that the story about two giants was merely a fictional explanation of reality, so that myth gets to stay in the exhibit. But really, volcanoes and hexagonal basalt pillars are pretty cool themselves. No myths needed!

Images: Scenic shot by code poet on Flickr. Hexagon close-up in public domain, via Wikimedia.


Filed under: Have Science Will Travel Tagged: lava, volcano