• The Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano has erupted regularly over the past few decades.
• It consists of two small uninhabited islands, Hunga-Ha’apai and Hunga-Tonga, poking about 100m above sea level 65km north of Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa.
• But hiding below the waves is a massive volcano, around 1800m high and 20 kilometres wide.
• During events in 2009 and 2014/15 hot jets of magma and steam-exploded through the waves. But these eruptions were small, dwarfed in scale by the January 2022 events.
• Researchers suggest this is one of the massive explosions the volcano is capable of producing roughly every thousand years.

Impact of the eruption

• • The ash plume is already about 20km high.
  • Most remarkably, it spread out almost concentrically over a distance of about 130km from the volcano, creating a plume with a 260km diameter, before it was distorted by the wind.
  • The eruption also produced a tsunami throughout Tonga and neighbouring Fiji and Samoa.
  • Shock waves traversed many thousands of kilometres, were seen from space and recorded in New Zealand some 2000km away.

• All these signs suggest the large Hunga caldera has awoken.

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