Eruption of the Tonga volcano, one of the most powerful in three decades and that could be seen from space

The eruption last Saturday of the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai submarine volcano, an underwater volcano 65 kilometers north of Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, is one of the most violent that has been recorded in the last thirty years on the planet, scientific sources said on Monday.

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The thunderous eruption of the Southern People, a volcano with a long history of activity and located between two islets -which are sometimes joined by the ash accumulated between them-, could be heard hundreds of kilometers away and its ashes and steam were expelled about 20 kilometers high.

The cloud of smoke expelled by the volcano Southern Hemisphere, which caused a tsunami, It had a diameter of 260 kilometers that could be observed by satellites in Earth orbit.

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“The large and explosive lateral extent of the eruption suggests that it was probably the largest since the (June 13) 1991 eruption of (Mount) Pinatubo.”Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland, told Radio New Zealand.

Then, Mount Pinatubo expelled a cloud of smoke and ashes up to a distance of more than twenty kilometers in altitude, as well as a shower of lava on the three rivers that border its slopes.

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Cronin explained that the preliminary data of the activity of Saturday of the Southern People suggest that the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), which measures the magnitude of the eruption, can reach five on a scale of eight, while that of Mount Pinatubo was six.

The volcanologist specified that an IEV eruption of five occurs no more than a couple of times in a decade, according to the source.

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Deshawn