TheHunga Tonga - Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruptionwhich happened on January 15 2022 , has brokenanother record book , knocking the previous track record holder , Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines , off the top smirch for highest plume ever recorded . Hunga Tonga - Hunga Haʻapai gain tallness of 57 km ( 34 miles ) , more than 17 kilometers ( 11 mile ) decipherable of the late disc holder .
commemorate bysatellite imagery , the plume is so bounteous that it required an entirely novel overture to be able-bodied to memorialise its size . In most cases , to mensurate the height of a volcano plume , the temperature is taken at the top and then compared with received air temperatures find oneself at different altitudes . Plumes are normally in the troposphere , the downhearted level of Earth ’s standard atmosphere where the temperature diminish with increase altitude .
However , this is the first commemorate instance of a vent plume pass on the mesosphere , the area of the standard pressure which is more commonly associated withshooting stars . The mesosphere is the third layer of the atmosphere , just about between 48 and 90 kilometers ( 30 - 56 mile ) in high spirits . Here , the air temperatures become an unreliable indicant , as they can start out to increase again with higher elevation . Therefore the team had to come up with a novel method .
Based on a phenomenon cry the the " parallax effect " – which explains why objects appear to change berth when viewed from different demarcation of sight – the method involved using three geostationary weather condition satellites 36,000 kilometers ( 22,369 miles ) up in space , and applying the parallax force to the images the satellites captured . During the clap the satellites record images every ten minutes , allowing the squad to detect the change in the flight of the plume .
" It ’s the first prison term we ’ve ever commemorate a volcanic plume attain the mesosphere , " said Dr Simon Proud , a National Centre for Earth Observation fourth-year scientist at the University of Oxford and RAL Space , in a statement seen by IFLScience . ‘ Krakatau in the 1800s might have done as well , but we did n’t see that in enough point to reassert .
The team now plan to develop an automatize arrangement to work out the pinnacle of other volcano feather using this unexampled method acting .
" We ’d also like to go for this technique to other eruptions and develop a dataset of plume heights that can be used by volcanologists and atmospheric scientists to sit the dispersion of volcanic ash in the aura ” , say atomic number 27 - source Dr Andrew Prata from the University of Oxford ’s Department of Atmospheric , Oceanic & Planetary Physics .
The study is published inScience .
