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When an underwater volcano 40 miles north of Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, erupted in January, it spewed out enough water vapor to fill 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools into the atmosphere.
The eruption of the undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano earlier this year sent enough water vapor into the stratosphere, located approximately eight to 33 miles above the Earth’s surface, to “temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature,” NASA says.
NASA WILL ONLY LET TOURISTS GO TO SPACE IF ACCOMPANIED BY FORMER ASTRONAUTS
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luis Millan, an atmospheric scientist for NASA who led a study examining the volcano’s eruption, said in a statement.
The eruption sent about 146 teragrams of water vapor into the stratosphere, nearly four times the amount of water vapor expelled from the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. One teragram is equal to a trillion grams.
The eruption of the undersea volcano, which spanned more than 12 miles wide, caused a sonic boom that could be heard as far away as Alaska and triggered a tsunami that devastated parts of Tonga and caused damage as far as the U.S. Pacific coasts.
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The volcano also erupted in late 2014 and early 2015, creating a small new island and disrupting international air travel to the Pacific archipelago for several days.
