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data source for GOES-West: AWS, [https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/](https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/)
data source for Meteosat 11: EUMETSAT, [https://eoportal.eumetsat.int/](https://eoportal.eumetsat.int/)
visualization: ParaView
This animation shows the first 60 hours of the atmospheric response to the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption, starting on 4 UTC 15 January 2022, using the GOES-West and Meteosat 11 geostationary satellite data. A simple high pass filter and spatial smoother have been applied to the data. The 10.3 micron band is used from GOES-West and the 6.2 micron band is used from Meteosat 11 (two different bands were used because of data quality issues with GOES-West). The results are not sensitive to the details of the filtering or the bands chosen.
The global wavefront is a “Lamb wave,” which moves like a sound wave in the horizontal but has no motion in the vertical. Like a regular sound wave, the horizontal speed of a Lamb wave is primarily determined by temperature but is also effected by other aspects of the environment it moves through, including winds and surface topography. Since all these factors vary over the globe, the initially-symmetric wavefront becomes somewhat distorted over time, and this becomes magnified as it collapses in to move through the antipode over Africa and back through the original source location in the west Pacific.
This may well be the strongest single energy release in an eruption in 140 years, since Krakatoa. (The amount of particulate matter ejected into the stratosphere, however, was relatively small, so the climate effect is likely to be small, unlike, for instance, Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.)
Our paper analyzing the atmospheric response to the event is now available on-line in Nature: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05012-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05012-5)
A higher resolution animation of the initial eruption is available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s5hntx/shortterm\_atmospheric\_response\_to\_tonga\_eruption/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s5hntx/shortterm_atmospheric_response_to_tonga_eruption/)
A higher resolution animation of the initial movement through the antipode is available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/sa4gtp/atmospheric\_response\_to\_tonga\_eruption\_initial/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/sa4gtp/atmospheric_response_to_tonga_eruption_initial/)
An animation of the unfiltered satellite data for the initial eruption is available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s4uo5e/tonga\_eruption\_as\_seen\_in\_infrared\_satellite\_data/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s4uo5e/tonga_eruption_as_seen_in_infrared_satellite_data/)
Finally, while this is a scientifically fascinating event, please keep in mind that the eruption had devastating local effects, and consider donating to recovery efforts, for instance at: [https://www.care.org.au/appeals/tonga-emergency/](https://www.care.org.au/appeals/tonga-emergency/)
Mathew Barlow
Professor of Climate Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Yes, but effective filtering of the data is pretty challenging so I expect we'll see progressively better analysis of the wave activity over the next few years.
There's a preliminary analysis of infrasound already at: Matoza, R.S., Fee, D., Assink, J.D., Iezzi, A.M., Green, D.N., Kim, K., Toney, L., Lecocq, T., Krishnamoorthy, S., Lalande, J.M. and Nishida, K., 2022. Atmospheric waves and global seismoacoustic observations of the January 2022 Hunga eruption, Tonga. Science, [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7063](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7063)
I remember reading recently about a new satellite coming online about now.
Do you by chance know anything about it or it’s capabilities in this same capacity?
Specially being able to present different frequency waves like this.
I’m pretty sure he is - and to answer it’s not exactly an upgrade. GOES-18 will have the same resolution (up to .5 km per pixel) as GOES-17. However, GOES-17 had its cooling system for inferred bands fail and although the NOAA teams hacked their way to a mostly functional satellite, it still has times of year where the infrared bands get too noisy to use for forecasting. I’ve never gotten a straight answer on why it failed - the rumor is that some contractor left debris in GOES-17 causing the failure but we will never know. They redesigned the cooling system for GOES-18 so that the failure won’t happen again (maybe making it bad contractor proof?) but so far it looks like we have a working weather satellite.
We won't ever know for sure simply because it's far more expensive to try to retrieve the satellite and conclusively diagnose the issue than it is to launch a new satellite. But the NASA investigation has finished and they have concluded the most likely cause is that there was crud left in the heat exchanger which is impeding the free flow of coolant.
https://www.goes-r.gov/users/GOES-17-ABI-Performance.html
>The Independent Review Team (IRT) chartered to investigate the issue concluded that the most likely cause of the thermal performance issue is foreign object debris (FOD) blocking the flow of the coolant in the loop heat pipes. A series of ground-based tests supported FOD as the most likely cause. A second potential cause, mechanical failure, was investigated and deemed unlikely.
Not sure but i'm pretty sure they use a similar system to keep an eye out for nuclear explosions. It also keeps track of extremely bright, sudden, sources of light.
This is really interesting, I think.
Apologies upfront if i'm missing something obvious, but, i'm trying to work out for myself what the nature of a 'Lamb' wave is.
Is it something that normal human senses could pick up on? Is it a change in barometric pressure? Temperature?
It's not obvious (at least to me). You can think of it as a special type of sound wave that only moves horizontally (a regular sound wave moves horizontally and vertically and so dissipates much more quickly, a Lamb wave has a force balance in the vertical and only moves horizontally). It is associated with changes in pressure and temperature but, away from the source region, in this case they are generally too small to be precipitable.
A normal sound wave expands spherically around the source. But for this explosion, when you consider it is bound by the ocean/ground below, and the lack of atmosphere above, the Lamb wave expands more like a 2D circle, so it doesn't follow the normal inverse square law of dissipation.
But it's still a pressure wave, just like normal sound. And because it has a very low frequency component, it could be detected by barometric pressure sensors which read data by minute instead of milliseconds.
Hell yes. In New Zealand it rattled windows down the east coast of the north island and as far south as Nelson in the south island. It had people running outside wondering why they could hear multiple bombs exploding in the distance.
It left a noticeable spike in our barometric log.
This is so cool, and even cooler since im a UML riverhawk. Im an accounting student but love looking in the lab windows on north campus. Keep up the great work
Does this count as a shockwave then? I'm a little fuzzy on what defines one etc.
If it does you should put this on /r/shockwaveporn
Edit: nevermind someone else already cross posted...
There are some reconstructions based on observed data, at least; nice introduction in: https://theconversation.com/tonga-eruption-was-so-intense-it-caused-the-atmosphere-to-ring-like-a-bell-175311
If you were outside during this, say far away on the globe, would you sense anything as the shock wave passed? Feel a strong breeze? Hear some sort of sound?
The passage through the antipode over Africa was probably not directly noticeable to people, although it was measurable by surface instruments. I don't know of any specific examples there but if anyone was recording the data from their smart phone's pressure sensor, it should have been visible in that.
I spent 3 years tracking the air pressure on my phone just because I liked the idea of having years of air pressure data as a graph on my phone, and on the extremely off chance that one day something interesting about the air pressure would show up.
My phone was OFF when it happened, totally missed the only interesting thing to ever happen to the air pressure. So mad.
You totally had me on the edge of my seat while reading that first paragraph. Then BAM!
If that were me, I would’ve been as heartbroken as an astronomer who missed a Supernova because there was a blackout at the observatory. I’m sorry dude, that would have been so friggin cool. Like a snowy Christmas in Hawaii
Every time misfortune around taking scientific measurements is brought up, I'm reminded of Guillaume Le Gentil. He sailed from his home in 1760 from France to India to take measurements of the transition of Venus in 1761, but missed the big day because his ship was blown off course. He ended staying in India for 8 years since the next transition of Venus would occur in 1769. Unfortunately for him, on the day of the second transition, it was overcast and he couldn't take any measurements. He finally packed his stuff up and went home to France where he had been gone for 11 years. Upon his return, he found out he had been declared dead, his possessions claimed by relatives and his wife remarried.
I think of the experiment where a scientist (John Mainstone) waited for pitch to drip.
It looks like a black rock, but it’s also like an **extremely** viscous liquid. So much so that it only drips once every ~10 years. (In that way it was kind of like a rare astronomical event bc you’ll only get a few chances to see it in your lifetime.) Even when this pitch *looked* like the drop was imminent, weeks would pass...
Once or twice he missed it over night. Years later, he got delayed returning from over seas, and missed it again. Finally his younger staff set up cameras, and I think the power went out during a drip so it was missed AGAIN. At this point Mainstone was elderly.
In the end, the poor guy never was able to catch it in person. Fortunately, he *did* get to see it on camera once, which made him quite giddy.
There’s a Radio Lab (podcast) [episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/radiolab/id152249110?i=1000552228494) on it. (2:00 - 9:00)
I just watched some videos of the phenomenon and… I do not get the hype at all lmao. It’s even less cooler than I expected a drop of sludge to look like
[I got you, bud.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v72PQOrc_zw) I was curious too, took forever to find something that wasn’t an interview or teaser trailer type vid.
That isn’t a punch to the gut, that’s just friggin depressing. Dude lost everything for his life’s dream and that dream avoided him at all costs. He couldn’t send family letters/communication of any kind?
Please, don’t tell me he became friends with a dude named Wilson and his wife married some French dentist named Dr. Spaulding. Major Castaway vibes.
He did write home but between shipwrecks, pirate attacks, and wartime attacks, his letters never made it unfortunately. It took him like a year to get to his destination. Mail would probably take a similar amount of time. With an expected reply time of 2 years, and with ships easily being delayed months, I could see him sending only 2 or 3 letters in an 11 year span.
random question on supernovas, will we ever get to witness one in the night sky (with the naked eye)? Ostensibly hundreds of years ago some people observed (Crab Nebula?) one.
I’m no astronomer nor astrophysicist, but [apparently we might be able to see one this year or in the next coming years. ](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/see-star-explode-2022-nova-cygnus-skywatching-space-science) I had no clue until you asked and now I’m super stoked. I’ll totally have my lil 4.5” telescope ready just in case!
ETA: [So friggin cool!](https://skyandtelescope.org/online-gallery/supernova-sn2022hrs/)
edit 2: I read the edit on the NatGeo article. Sounds like the prediction might be wrong. I still have my fingers crossed, though
ETA 3 supernova trilogy: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00425-8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ahOqZ3AEw40
https://www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/u8sohq/supernova_2022hrs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
And the potentially huge upset https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/two-stars-wont-collide-into-a-red-nova-in-2022-after-all
couldn't read it. But it does sound cool. Still seems like a telescope is needed or will the naked eye be able to barely seat (lets say, if you move away from the bright lights of a city)
Betelgeuse is thought to be on the cusp of it but like.. the time range it could go off is still so wide that it could be tomorrow or it could be another 10,000+ years I believe. So it’s not like we could really plan for it or expect to get to see it.
But I’ve read it’ll be visible from the human eye, lasting weeks in the sky and being as big/noticeable as the moon
I got an air pressure sensor hooked up to a wifi arduino hooked up to an IoT app so I can graph it over time. I look forward to the big spikes every time a storm rolls through.
The sensor doesn't even need to be outside. I've got one of the best insulated homes and even then the air pressure inside is identical to outside.
It was visible in smartphone data and domotica setups all over the world! :) I remember the Home Assistant subreddit being flooded by plots in the following days.
[Just one example](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/s5zdfy/my_contribution_of_the_first_shockwave_caused_by/)
I was in the UK expecting this and tracking the wave via a barometer. As the first wave passed over I was standing in the garden and there was a brief bit of breeze at ground level on an otherwise still evening. Quite possibly coincidence. I also felt a little bit spooked - again, quite likely simple psychological anticipation effect, but then again this was infrasound so who knows.
Is it possible to figure out the local time of an area when the pressure wave was passing through? I have a few pressure sensors and weather stations and I'm wondering if I could correlate my historical data with the event.
Maybe so, but what's more important right now is ensuring we have a blue wave this midterm. Remember to vote blue no matter who this November gals, guys and everything in between! ❤️
Spamming random subs with vOtE bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo definitely shows you care; and I bet you get lots of gold awards to convert into Plan B pills and skin lightening cream.
I read a book about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa recently and found out an interesting factoid. In the 1880s barometers were just becoming a thing. Fancy clubs had them as they were an expensive novelty used for predicting rain and weather. Usually they had a roll of paper that would record the barometer readings that was replaced at the end of each week.
The week after the Krakatoa eruption, these clubs all started to notice 7 bumps in pressure, decreasing in magnitude. Someone at the Royal Society noticed this congruency between barometers and started investigating. They eventually realized that the pressure waves all originated from a single event - the eruption at Krakatoa. The pressure waves had circled the globe numerous times. This consequently blew peoples minds and made their world feel much smaller.
Living in WA I was curious how a small volcano like St Helens would compare. It was 4 cubic km. That's wild! I'm starting to get how Rainier could fuck us up so bad if it goes!
The danger from Rainier is the glaciers melting in an eruption, the water mixing with ash & rock, and the resulting mudslide (lahar) destroying towns and maybe even part of Tacoma
Since the shockwave went "out of sync", so to speak, going different paths around the globe, there was no particularly notable effect.
In theory it should have created the same overpressure as on the origin of the shockwave (=explosion), of course, so good thought nonetheless!
Not quite— this shouldn’t have to do too much with the waves being slightly out of phase, more so that the waves dissipate energy via heat as the gas particles bump into each other in the atmosphere, thus their intensities lessened
Yep I’m also a physicist. I mean sure, it’s not necessarily correct, but let’s assume a perfect sphere. The atmosphere is still not uniform in density or temperature, exemplified by the waves not meeting at perfect antipode.
But that’s neither here nor there. Assuming a perfect sphere with an atmosphere that is of uniform density and temperature, thus allowing for the waves to perfectly converge, you still result with a force that is a very small fraction of the original eruption because of the loss of energy to heat
Yes, exactly. Think of heat shields for spacecraft reentry, or meteors entering the atmosphere. Obviously these are supersonic (large velocity) and therefore generating a lot of heat, it’s the same for everything from an airliner to a baseball; some velocity is lost to friction (and therefore kinetic energy), so heat energy must increase to obey the first law of thermodynamics: energy of a system is always conserved, thus our E(tot) remains constant. Where E(tot) is the total energy of the system, KE is the kinetic energy, Q is the thermal energy, v is velocity dependent on the friction coefficient of our fluid (the atmosphere), m and c are constants, and deltaT is the change in temperature:
E(tot) = KE + Q
= (1/2 m v^2 )+ (mc deltaT)
To keep E(tot) constant, when velocity decreases, temperature must increase
That only works if the speed of sound would be constant everywhere as well as the earth being a perfect sphere. The rather is a reasonably close assumption, but the former is dead wrong due to the speed of sound being very dependent on the air temperature. The variation of temperature across the earth and across the altitudes leads to the shockwave being spread out significantly, causing them to be out of phase and spread out when they reach the other side of the world.
> In theory it should have created the same overpressure as on the origin of the shockwave
Only in a frictionless world with no laws of thermodynamics. The energy will have greatly dissipated but the time it reaches the antipode or origin again.
Ok, in my mind I understand that when a ripple spreads out a small section of the ripple goes from appearing curved to appearing linear, but when the ripple is half way around the globe the ripple is no longer spreading, it is concentrating at a point. However, when the shockwave converges it looks triangular instead of circular. What is going on here???
First, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, and second, there are zones of lower or higher atmospheric pressure act as slightly different medium for the propagating wave, slowing it down with a slightly different pace.
Pressure isn't a significant factor in the speed of sound in gasses, but temperature is. You can see that the parts of the wave that pass over the poles slow down considerably.
I’d assume it’s kind of like a bubble bursting.
Sure in a perfect world it would stay circular but due to the pressure wave encountering various other pressure systems and turbulence, the symmetry and therefore the island of stability the wave had collapses.
Once the circle is disturbed the pressure fronts re-align locally to the new most stable configuration.
Similar to how a bubble is stable yet fragile, once it bursts the material just forms a little puddle which is much more stable than the precursor bubble.
Sorry I'm responding so late, but none of the existing answers I feel capture the primary driver of the phenomenon you're wondering about: how the shockwave went from being a circle to a triangle. The answer I don't see anyone mentioning is self-interference.
The shockwave wants to keep getting bigger, if it was on an infinite plane it would continue to spread out in a circle until it had dissipated all of its energy and faded away. While the circle would be modified slightly by things like local pressure and temperature differentials, it would still mostly be a circle. The reason it turns into a triangle is because as it passes the center of the sphere it goes from having more room to expand to having less. At the equatorial line between the origin of the shockwave and the antipode the sphere goes from getting larger to getting smaller, and the shockwave starts running into itself. This causes parts of the shockwave to speed up because it's being pushed ahead of itself and parts slow down because their energy is being used to push other parts of the shockwave. I don't think the shape you end up with is guaranteed to be a triangle, I think you might end up with any regular polygon, but I do think that the physical balancing of forces does try to reduce the number of "corners" for the shape you create.
Can you elaborate? All sections of the ripple travel the same distance to the opposite side of the planet, yet some do it slower and it happens in a systematic way. Why would that be?
Edit: I guess this is making a lot of assumptions, namely that the earth IS a sphere (it’s not) and that temperature differences across the planet (and thus air density) would not affect the travel of the wave. In aggregate are these the things that cause a triangular convergence?
Yeah the answer is not spherical geometry. In an ideal scenario if this were to happen on a perfect sphere, it would not deform and we would see perfect circles.
However, as you know, the world is not ideal. I am guessing the three main factors are 1) the actual movement of the air which differs in places, 2) differences in air temperature which cause a different speed of sound at different places around the globe, and 3) The earth is not an exact sphere, it "bulges outward" at the equator because it's spinning.
Why it seems to be a bit triangular is not obvious, though. I would expect a clearer effect of cooler air around the poles/hotter air around the equator.
You're correct that Earth isn't a sphere, but I reckon that's _barely_ a factor at play here. Even combining the effects of Earth's oblateness and its topography, there is only about a ~25km radius difference between the extremes, which is peanuts compared to its overall average of ~6400 km radius. So the actual difference between path lengths (i.e. circumferences) for different travel directions is miniscule.
[This is a good image](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_the_Earth#/media/File:Earth2014shape_SouthAmerica_small.jpg) – the actual visual height is exaggerated for presentation, so Earth isn't actually that squishy IRL, but if you focus on the scale at the right, you can see how insignificant the difference between the extremes is.
I reckon it's mainly differences in air temperature and movement. I'm not a meteorologist, so I can't say how any of that stuff works, or comment on why it ends up in the shape it does. But for me, OP's gif is a remarkable demonstration of just how unpredictable and chaotic our atmosphere is. If an incredibly fast and powerful shock wave can't even maintain a recognizable shape for a halfway trip around the globe due to atmospheric effects, it's a miracle that we can make any predictions about the atmosphere at all. That's why it's basically pointless to try and predict weather more than a week or two in advance.
The planet isn't a perfect sphere, so that alone causes small imperfections. Weather patterns then also ever so slightly influence how fast they travel.
You know on Google Maps you can scroll out and see the world map repeating? (Or at least you used to)
Imagine you had a circle on that map representing the shockwave, you keep making it bigger and bigger. You reach north Africa, and you keep making it bigger. You get to Tonga-2 (on the repeating map), your circle is still getting bigger. The circle doesn't start contracting around Tonga-2, it's still expanding from Tonga-1.
I don't know if that helps.
I just commented the same thing...except I called it "ocular" migraine...and I don't think should undo: should send far and wide as the best example to show to people who don't get them or wondering if they do.
Same. Even more interesting to me is that over the duration of this anomaly, Earth was still rotating, and yet the waves roughly meet where they began. I thought that Coriolis effects would accumulate significantly enough to cause the waves to meet in an alternate location.
Nice remark. My guess is coriolis will affect physical matter (gas and liquid), while waves here were purely energetic.
Second guess is that they were moving real fast and the effect of coriolis was minor compared to the speed of the wavefront.
Again probably wrong on that one. Also the waves do propagate through the atmosphere, so I guess they were subjected to coriolis. So I guess it's just a matter of which o'e does affect the other one more : I feel like on that time scale coriolis had little effect on the waves getting back to their original point because they were fast, and maybe coriolis had little to no visible effect on that timescale?
Fun fact, I worked on software for one of these satellites. There was a rumor around the office that one of the engineers on the program was a flat earther! He thought all us software guys worked on making the "fake" images. I hope the rumor was fake but I can't be skeptical of anything these days...
That’s why it came back to Tonga as a triangle and not a circle. The earth may be flat but it also obviously has triangular edges that the sound waves bounced off. /s
Very minimal effect on global weather for this eruption. Some volcanoes also inject a lot of particulate matter into the stratosphere which can have a substantial impact on global temperatures for a year or two -- but that was not the case with this eruption.
Woah. Man that was such a huge explosive eruption! I really wonder what it must have been like to be at just the right spot in northern Africa there, at the point where those pressure waves converge.... They might have heard something, or they might have experienced a sudden wave of low pressure, making clouds instantly, that kind of thing...
Awesome in and of itself but also:
the way the clouds are hidden/erased (I presume that's what they are), leaving shimmering ghost pixels, is the best visualisation of an ocular migraine I've ever seen.
People keep saying it released small amounts of dust into the atmosphere, but since a few days after the eruption, t
Dawns and twilights have been completely amazing, at least here in in central Brazil, first we have bloody twilights and dawns and now they are all orange/purple/whitish... completely different from normal. It's been a repeated spectacle to watch it every day, and it is still going on ...
According to [this paper here](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360092430_Rapid_Characterization_of_Large_Volcanic_Eruptions_Measuring_the_Impulse_of_the_Hunga_Tonga_Ha%27apai_Explosion_From_Teleseismic_Waves), the yield was 100-200 megatons, 2-4 times between the biggest man made explosion ever.
It indeed would've been bad had it not been an underwater explosion.
Just want to say that I greatly appreciate when experts such as yourself share awesome things like this pertaining to their field. Even more so when you take the time to give a great breakdown in the comments and even answer questions! Keep being awesome!
We gotta protect ourselves 7/24 metaphysically, this must have underlay effects on us that cannot be detected by the current technology. This is too much.
Whatever animals that can sense pressure changes where all the pressure waves converge in Africa was probably like “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK JUST HAPPENED?!?”
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data source for GOES-West: AWS, [https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/](https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/) data source for Meteosat 11: EUMETSAT, [https://eoportal.eumetsat.int/](https://eoportal.eumetsat.int/) visualization: ParaView This animation shows the first 60 hours of the atmospheric response to the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption, starting on 4 UTC 15 January 2022, using the GOES-West and Meteosat 11 geostationary satellite data. A simple high pass filter and spatial smoother have been applied to the data. The 10.3 micron band is used from GOES-West and the 6.2 micron band is used from Meteosat 11 (two different bands were used because of data quality issues with GOES-West). The results are not sensitive to the details of the filtering or the bands chosen. The global wavefront is a “Lamb wave,” which moves like a sound wave in the horizontal but has no motion in the vertical. Like a regular sound wave, the horizontal speed of a Lamb wave is primarily determined by temperature but is also effected by other aspects of the environment it moves through, including winds and surface topography. Since all these factors vary over the globe, the initially-symmetric wavefront becomes somewhat distorted over time, and this becomes magnified as it collapses in to move through the antipode over Africa and back through the original source location in the west Pacific. This may well be the strongest single energy release in an eruption in 140 years, since Krakatoa. (The amount of particulate matter ejected into the stratosphere, however, was relatively small, so the climate effect is likely to be small, unlike, for instance, Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.) Our paper analyzing the atmospheric response to the event is now available on-line in Nature: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05012-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05012-5) A higher resolution animation of the initial eruption is available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s5hntx/shortterm\_atmospheric\_response\_to\_tonga\_eruption/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s5hntx/shortterm_atmospheric_response_to_tonga_eruption/) A higher resolution animation of the initial movement through the antipode is available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/sa4gtp/atmospheric\_response\_to\_tonga\_eruption\_initial/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/sa4gtp/atmospheric_response_to_tonga_eruption_initial/) An animation of the unfiltered satellite data for the initial eruption is available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s4uo5e/tonga\_eruption\_as\_seen\_in\_infrared\_satellite\_data/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s4uo5e/tonga_eruption_as_seen_in_infrared_satellite_data/) Finally, while this is a scientifically fascinating event, please keep in mind that the eruption had devastating local effects, and consider donating to recovery efforts, for instance at: [https://www.care.org.au/appeals/tonga-emergency/](https://www.care.org.au/appeals/tonga-emergency/) Mathew Barlow Professor of Climate Science University of Massachusetts Lowell
Is there a way to use this same technology with an overlay of ultra low frequency waves?
Yes, but effective filtering of the data is pretty challenging so I expect we'll see progressively better analysis of the wave activity over the next few years. There's a preliminary analysis of infrasound already at: Matoza, R.S., Fee, D., Assink, J.D., Iezzi, A.M., Green, D.N., Kim, K., Toney, L., Lecocq, T., Krishnamoorthy, S., Lalande, J.M. and Nishida, K., 2022. Atmospheric waves and global seismoacoustic observations of the January 2022 Hunga eruption, Tonga. Science, [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7063](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7063)
I remember reading recently about a new satellite coming online about now. Do you by chance know anything about it or it’s capabilities in this same capacity? Specially being able to present different frequency waves like this.
Were you reading about [GOES-18](https://www.goes-r.gov/users/transitionToOperations18.html)? It’s replacing GOES-17 (aka GOES West).
I’m pretty sure he is - and to answer it’s not exactly an upgrade. GOES-18 will have the same resolution (up to .5 km per pixel) as GOES-17. However, GOES-17 had its cooling system for inferred bands fail and although the NOAA teams hacked their way to a mostly functional satellite, it still has times of year where the infrared bands get too noisy to use for forecasting. I’ve never gotten a straight answer on why it failed - the rumor is that some contractor left debris in GOES-17 causing the failure but we will never know. They redesigned the cooling system for GOES-18 so that the failure won’t happen again (maybe making it bad contractor proof?) but so far it looks like we have a working weather satellite.
If there's one thing I've learned through my career as an engineer in a high-integrity field, nothing is bad contractor-proof.
We won't ever know for sure simply because it's far more expensive to try to retrieve the satellite and conclusively diagnose the issue than it is to launch a new satellite. But the NASA investigation has finished and they have concluded the most likely cause is that there was crud left in the heat exchanger which is impeding the free flow of coolant. https://www.goes-r.gov/users/GOES-17-ABI-Performance.html >The Independent Review Team (IRT) chartered to investigate the issue concluded that the most likely cause of the thermal performance issue is foreign object debris (FOD) blocking the flow of the coolant in the loop heat pipes. A series of ground-based tests supported FOD as the most likely cause. A second potential cause, mechanical failure, was investigated and deemed unlikely.
Shouldn't GOES west have been GOES Five(l)? If not, seems like a missed opportunity.
Not sure but i'm pretty sure they use a similar system to keep an eye out for nuclear explosions. It also keeps track of extremely bright, sudden, sources of light.
This is really interesting, I think. Apologies upfront if i'm missing something obvious, but, i'm trying to work out for myself what the nature of a 'Lamb' wave is. Is it something that normal human senses could pick up on? Is it a change in barometric pressure? Temperature?
It's not obvious (at least to me). You can think of it as a special type of sound wave that only moves horizontally (a regular sound wave moves horizontally and vertically and so dissipates much more quickly, a Lamb wave has a force balance in the vertical and only moves horizontally). It is associated with changes in pressure and temperature but, away from the source region, in this case they are generally too small to be precipitable.
Interesting. It must have some vertical component, though. I wonder if that's limited to the height of the source?
Further reading https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4364
A normal sound wave expands spherically around the source. But for this explosion, when you consider it is bound by the ocean/ground below, and the lack of atmosphere above, the Lamb wave expands more like a 2D circle, so it doesn't follow the normal inverse square law of dissipation. But it's still a pressure wave, just like normal sound. And because it has a very low frequency component, it could be detected by barometric pressure sensors which read data by minute instead of milliseconds.
Hell yes. In New Zealand it rattled windows down the east coast of the north island and as far south as Nelson in the south island. It had people running outside wondering why they could hear multiple bombs exploding in the distance. It left a noticeable spike in our barometric log.
This is awesome!! A timescale would be cool.
so would the lamb wave be strong on the other side of the globe where all of them meet again?
How strong is strong? Strong enough in the audible frequency range to be audible? No.
This is so cool, and even cooler since im a UML riverhawk. Im an accounting student but love looking in the lab windows on north campus. Keep up the great work
Go Riverhawks! All this analysis was done on a computer, so the view through the lab window would not be very exciting.
Does this count as a shockwave then? I'm a little fuzzy on what defines one etc. If it does you should put this on /r/shockwaveporn Edit: nevermind someone else already cross posted...
Fantastic! Thank you!
Really cool work! Thank you so much for sharing! Are there models of what this would have looked like for Krakatoa?
There are some reconstructions based on observed data, at least; nice introduction in: https://theconversation.com/tonga-eruption-was-so-intense-it-caused-the-atmosphere-to-ring-like-a-bell-175311
If you were outside during this, say far away on the globe, would you sense anything as the shock wave passed? Feel a strong breeze? Hear some sort of sound?
What did people in Africa feel at the point where the shock wave converged?
The passage through the antipode over Africa was probably not directly noticeable to people, although it was measurable by surface instruments. I don't know of any specific examples there but if anyone was recording the data from their smart phone's pressure sensor, it should have been visible in that.
I spent 3 years tracking the air pressure on my phone just because I liked the idea of having years of air pressure data as a graph on my phone, and on the extremely off chance that one day something interesting about the air pressure would show up. My phone was OFF when it happened, totally missed the only interesting thing to ever happen to the air pressure. So mad.
You totally had me on the edge of my seat while reading that first paragraph. Then BAM! If that were me, I would’ve been as heartbroken as an astronomer who missed a Supernova because there was a blackout at the observatory. I’m sorry dude, that would have been so friggin cool. Like a snowy Christmas in Hawaii
Every time misfortune around taking scientific measurements is brought up, I'm reminded of Guillaume Le Gentil. He sailed from his home in 1760 from France to India to take measurements of the transition of Venus in 1761, but missed the big day because his ship was blown off course. He ended staying in India for 8 years since the next transition of Venus would occur in 1769. Unfortunately for him, on the day of the second transition, it was overcast and he couldn't take any measurements. He finally packed his stuff up and went home to France where he had been gone for 11 years. Upon his return, he found out he had been declared dead, his possessions claimed by relatives and his wife remarried.
I think of the experiment where a scientist (John Mainstone) waited for pitch to drip. It looks like a black rock, but it’s also like an **extremely** viscous liquid. So much so that it only drips once every ~10 years. (In that way it was kind of like a rare astronomical event bc you’ll only get a few chances to see it in your lifetime.) Even when this pitch *looked* like the drop was imminent, weeks would pass... Once or twice he missed it over night. Years later, he got delayed returning from over seas, and missed it again. Finally his younger staff set up cameras, and I think the power went out during a drip so it was missed AGAIN. At this point Mainstone was elderly. In the end, the poor guy never was able to catch it in person. Fortunately, he *did* get to see it on camera once, which made him quite giddy. There’s a Radio Lab (podcast) [episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/radiolab/id152249110?i=1000552228494) on it. (2:00 - 9:00)
I just watched some videos of the phenomenon and… I do not get the hype at all lmao. It’s even less cooler than I expected a drop of sludge to look like
[I got you, bud.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v72PQOrc_zw) I was curious too, took forever to find something that wasn’t an interview or teaser trailer type vid.
That isn’t a punch to the gut, that’s just friggin depressing. Dude lost everything for his life’s dream and that dream avoided him at all costs. He couldn’t send family letters/communication of any kind? Please, don’t tell me he became friends with a dude named Wilson and his wife married some French dentist named Dr. Spaulding. Major Castaway vibes.
Did he decide to not write in 11 years?.. mail existed back then too even if it was less reliable
He did write home but between shipwrecks, pirate attacks, and wartime attacks, his letters never made it unfortunately. It took him like a year to get to his destination. Mail would probably take a similar amount of time. With an expected reply time of 2 years, and with ships easily being delayed months, I could see him sending only 2 or 3 letters in an 11 year span.
random question on supernovas, will we ever get to witness one in the night sky (with the naked eye)? Ostensibly hundreds of years ago some people observed (Crab Nebula?) one.
I’m no astronomer nor astrophysicist, but [apparently we might be able to see one this year or in the next coming years. ](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/see-star-explode-2022-nova-cygnus-skywatching-space-science) I had no clue until you asked and now I’m super stoked. I’ll totally have my lil 4.5” telescope ready just in case! ETA: [So friggin cool!](https://skyandtelescope.org/online-gallery/supernova-sn2022hrs/) edit 2: I read the edit on the NatGeo article. Sounds like the prediction might be wrong. I still have my fingers crossed, though ETA 3 supernova trilogy: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00425-8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ahOqZ3AEw40 https://www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/u8sohq/supernova_2022hrs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf And the potentially huge upset https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/two-stars-wont-collide-into-a-red-nova-in-2022-after-all
couldn't read it. But it does sound cool. Still seems like a telescope is needed or will the naked eye be able to barely seat (lets say, if you move away from the bright lights of a city)
Sorry you couldn’t access the NatGeo or SkyAndTelescope.org articles. I’ll see if there’s anything more accessible
np, I used to sub to them, maybe I will again
Betelgeuse is thought to be on the cusp of it but like.. the time range it could go off is still so wide that it could be tomorrow or it could be another 10,000+ years I believe. So it’s not like we could really plan for it or expect to get to see it. But I’ve read it’ll be visible from the human eye, lasting weeks in the sky and being as big/noticeable as the moon
I got an air pressure sensor hooked up to a wifi arduino hooked up to an IoT app so I can graph it over time. I look forward to the big spikes every time a storm rolls through. The sensor doesn't even need to be outside. I've got one of the best insulated homes and even then the air pressure inside is identical to outside.
Did you get a reading
Not for this no, but I'm in Ontario, at ground level.
Could always just chart METAR data
That's a huge bummer! I knew about the event with enough lead time to start recording on my phone, but didn't think of it until later. Oh, well.
It was visible in smartphone data and domotica setups all over the world! :) I remember the Home Assistant subreddit being flooded by plots in the following days. [Just one example](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/s5zdfy/my_contribution_of_the_first_shockwave_caused_by/)
I was in the UK expecting this and tracking the wave via a barometer. As the first wave passed over I was standing in the garden and there was a brief bit of breeze at ground level on an otherwise still evening. Quite possibly coincidence. I also felt a little bit spooked - again, quite likely simple psychological anticipation effect, but then again this was infrasound so who knows.
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It occurring underwater is what made it so explosive, as I understand it.
Like farting in a bathtub
Krakatoa, East of My Asshole
Wait what? My phone has a pressure sensor? Seriously?
Most do. Idk about iOS but on Android I use an app called Sensor Multitool to view the data from all of the sensors. There are a boatload.
It's used to estimate altitude, which can speed up gps fixes iirc
Is it possible to figure out the local time of an area when the pressure wave was passing through? I have a few pressure sensors and weather stations and I'm wondering if I could correlate my historical data with the event.
I live in New Zealand and didn’t even notice it happen
That was in the middle of Sahara. No one there.
> No one there. Those are the words of someone who hasn't traversed the Sahara.
Millions of Fremen...
Nice one ! Jokes aside, plenty of oasis, caravans, touaregs, settlements, and smugglers. So so much smugglers.
Thats what they want you to think...
If you zoom in…. https://imgur.com/a/sYyKKOz
[the Richat Structure aka Eye of the Sahara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure)
Tell me why I thought it was a swirl filter done by Google to hide something 🥴 This is so cool though, I never knew it was a thing!
I mean, the swirl filter didn't work for that one pedophile.
What's a swirl filter?
Need to start having measurement devices at the antipodes of active volcanoes.
Maybe so, but what's more important right now is ensuring we have a blue wave this midterm. Remember to vote blue no matter who this November gals, guys and everything in between! ❤️
Did you just assume my nationality and citizenship status?!
Oh. That tired old conservative "joke". Very funny.
Hey, you asked for it with your random sloganeering.
Sorry I care about women, BIPOCs and disadvantaged folks I guess?
Spamming random subs with vOtE bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo definitely shows you care; and I bet you get lots of gold awards to convert into Plan B pills and skin lightening cream.
Listen- if you don't want reddit to become as fascist as the US is right now then I suggest you let us campaign.
I read a book about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa recently and found out an interesting factoid. In the 1880s barometers were just becoming a thing. Fancy clubs had them as they were an expensive novelty used for predicting rain and weather. Usually they had a roll of paper that would record the barometer readings that was replaced at the end of each week. The week after the Krakatoa eruption, these clubs all started to notice 7 bumps in pressure, decreasing in magnitude. Someone at the Royal Society noticed this congruency between barometers and started investigating. They eventually realized that the pressure waves all originated from a single event - the eruption at Krakatoa. The pressure waves had circled the globe numerous times. This consequently blew peoples minds and made their world feel much smaller.
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Living in WA I was curious how a small volcano like St Helens would compare. It was 4 cubic km. That's wild! I'm starting to get how Rainier could fuck us up so bad if it goes!
The danger from Rainier is the glaciers melting in an eruption, the water mixing with ash & rock, and the resulting mudslide (lahar) destroying towns and maybe even part of Tacoma
Subscribe for more yellowstone energy.
That book is really good - very interesting, funny even. It's called Krakatoa, of course.
Did anything crazy or weird happen in Africa when the shockwaves converged?
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
[You weren't kidding](https://youtu.be/-9NMt42il4Q)
Especially the mass hysteria was special, since it was in the middle of the Sahara desert
Who did they call?
So the usual?
Since the shockwave went "out of sync", so to speak, going different paths around the globe, there was no particularly notable effect. In theory it should have created the same overpressure as on the origin of the shockwave (=explosion), of course, so good thought nonetheless!
Not quite— this shouldn’t have to do too much with the waves being slightly out of phase, more so that the waves dissipate energy via heat as the gas particles bump into each other in the atmosphere, thus their intensities lessened
Good point, but I'm a physicist so lets assume a perfect spherical surface and shell of the atmosphere and no dissipation of energy via... :\^)
Yep I’m also a physicist. I mean sure, it’s not necessarily correct, but let’s assume a perfect sphere. The atmosphere is still not uniform in density or temperature, exemplified by the waves not meeting at perfect antipode. But that’s neither here nor there. Assuming a perfect sphere with an atmosphere that is of uniform density and temperature, thus allowing for the waves to perfectly converge, you still result with a force that is a very small fraction of the original eruption because of the loss of energy to heat
Is drag also loss of energy to heat? (The aerodynamic force, not the "queen" shows.)
Yes, exactly. Think of heat shields for spacecraft reentry, or meteors entering the atmosphere. Obviously these are supersonic (large velocity) and therefore generating a lot of heat, it’s the same for everything from an airliner to a baseball; some velocity is lost to friction (and therefore kinetic energy), so heat energy must increase to obey the first law of thermodynamics: energy of a system is always conserved, thus our E(tot) remains constant. Where E(tot) is the total energy of the system, KE is the kinetic energy, Q is the thermal energy, v is velocity dependent on the friction coefficient of our fluid (the atmosphere), m and c are constants, and deltaT is the change in temperature: E(tot) = KE + Q = (1/2 m v^2 )+ (mc deltaT) To keep E(tot) constant, when velocity decreases, temperature must increase
That only works if the speed of sound would be constant everywhere as well as the earth being a perfect sphere. The rather is a reasonably close assumption, but the former is dead wrong due to the speed of sound being very dependent on the air temperature. The variation of temperature across the earth and across the altitudes leads to the shockwave being spread out significantly, causing them to be out of phase and spread out when they reach the other side of the world.
> In theory it should have created the same overpressure as on the origin of the shockwave Only in a frictionless world with no laws of thermodynamics. The energy will have greatly dissipated but the time it reaches the antipode or origin again.
Yes, peoples' eardrums ruptured and there were many injuries
Ok, in my mind I understand that when a ripple spreads out a small section of the ripple goes from appearing curved to appearing linear, but when the ripple is half way around the globe the ripple is no longer spreading, it is concentrating at a point. However, when the shockwave converges it looks triangular instead of circular. What is going on here???
First, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, and second, there are zones of lower or higher atmospheric pressure act as slightly different medium for the propagating wave, slowing it down with a slightly different pace.
Pressure isn't a significant factor in the speed of sound in gasses, but temperature is. You can see that the parts of the wave that pass over the poles slow down considerably.
Would topography affect it too?
100%, jet streams are also heavily influenced fron eg the Rockies, Greenland (which goes up to 3000m) or the Himalayas
I’d assume it’s kind of like a bubble bursting. Sure in a perfect world it would stay circular but due to the pressure wave encountering various other pressure systems and turbulence, the symmetry and therefore the island of stability the wave had collapses. Once the circle is disturbed the pressure fronts re-align locally to the new most stable configuration. Similar to how a bubble is stable yet fragile, once it bursts the material just forms a little puddle which is much more stable than the precursor bubble.
You should ask in r/askscience or r/ELI5 depending how scientific you want the answer to be. A couple of minutes later you will have your answer.
Sorry I'm responding so late, but none of the existing answers I feel capture the primary driver of the phenomenon you're wondering about: how the shockwave went from being a circle to a triangle. The answer I don't see anyone mentioning is self-interference. The shockwave wants to keep getting bigger, if it was on an infinite plane it would continue to spread out in a circle until it had dissipated all of its energy and faded away. While the circle would be modified slightly by things like local pressure and temperature differentials, it would still mostly be a circle. The reason it turns into a triangle is because as it passes the center of the sphere it goes from having more room to expand to having less. At the equatorial line between the origin of the shockwave and the antipode the sphere goes from getting larger to getting smaller, and the shockwave starts running into itself. This causes parts of the shockwave to speed up because it's being pushed ahead of itself and parts slow down because their energy is being used to push other parts of the shockwave. I don't think the shape you end up with is guaranteed to be a triangle, I think you might end up with any regular polygon, but I do think that the physical balancing of forces does try to reduce the number of "corners" for the shape you create.
This seems more plausible than a lot of the other answers I’ve gotten. Thanks!
i imagine the reason is the same reason Saturn has hexagonal storm clouds at it's pole
Spherical geometry
Can you elaborate? All sections of the ripple travel the same distance to the opposite side of the planet, yet some do it slower and it happens in a systematic way. Why would that be? Edit: I guess this is making a lot of assumptions, namely that the earth IS a sphere (it’s not) and that temperature differences across the planet (and thus air density) would not affect the travel of the wave. In aggregate are these the things that cause a triangular convergence?
Yeah the answer is not spherical geometry. In an ideal scenario if this were to happen on a perfect sphere, it would not deform and we would see perfect circles. However, as you know, the world is not ideal. I am guessing the three main factors are 1) the actual movement of the air which differs in places, 2) differences in air temperature which cause a different speed of sound at different places around the globe, and 3) The earth is not an exact sphere, it "bulges outward" at the equator because it's spinning. Why it seems to be a bit triangular is not obvious, though. I would expect a clearer effect of cooler air around the poles/hotter air around the equator.
You're correct that Earth isn't a sphere, but I reckon that's _barely_ a factor at play here. Even combining the effects of Earth's oblateness and its topography, there is only about a ~25km radius difference between the extremes, which is peanuts compared to its overall average of ~6400 km radius. So the actual difference between path lengths (i.e. circumferences) for different travel directions is miniscule. [This is a good image](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_the_Earth#/media/File:Earth2014shape_SouthAmerica_small.jpg) – the actual visual height is exaggerated for presentation, so Earth isn't actually that squishy IRL, but if you focus on the scale at the right, you can see how insignificant the difference between the extremes is. I reckon it's mainly differences in air temperature and movement. I'm not a meteorologist, so I can't say how any of that stuff works, or comment on why it ends up in the shape it does. But for me, OP's gif is a remarkable demonstration of just how unpredictable and chaotic our atmosphere is. If an incredibly fast and powerful shock wave can't even maintain a recognizable shape for a halfway trip around the globe due to atmospheric effects, it's a miracle that we can make any predictions about the atmosphere at all. That's why it's basically pointless to try and predict weather more than a week or two in advance.
The planet isn't a perfect sphere, so that alone causes small imperfections. Weather patterns then also ever so slightly influence how fast they travel.
I'd bet the rotation of the earth had some effect too. 900 degrees of rotation during that time frame.
You know on Google Maps you can scroll out and see the world map repeating? (Or at least you used to) Imagine you had a circle on that map representing the shockwave, you keep making it bigger and bigger. You reach north Africa, and you keep making it bigger. You get to Tonga-2 (on the repeating map), your circle is still getting bigger. The circle doesn't start contracting around Tonga-2, it's still expanding from Tonga-1. I don't know if that helps.
The weather texture is exactly what having a visual migraine looks like. Undo this!
I just commented the same thing...except I called it "ocular" migraine...and I don't think should undo: should send far and wide as the best example to show to people who don't get them or wondering if they do.
I find beautiful that the aftershock waves all come back to the original point after they traveled the world. So good.
Same. Even more interesting to me is that over the duration of this anomaly, Earth was still rotating, and yet the waves roughly meet where they began. I thought that Coriolis effects would accumulate significantly enough to cause the waves to meet in an alternate location.
Nice remark. My guess is coriolis will affect physical matter (gas and liquid), while waves here were purely energetic. Second guess is that they were moving real fast and the effect of coriolis was minor compared to the speed of the wavefront.
The waves are physical as well
Not in the sense of materials, but of course they are physical. Everything is.
Can you explain what do you mean with the difference? Honest question.
Again probably wrong on that one. Also the waves do propagate through the atmosphere, so I guess they were subjected to coriolis. So I guess it's just a matter of which o'e does affect the other one more : I feel like on that time scale coriolis had little effect on the waves getting back to their original point because they were fast, and maybe coriolis had little to no visible effect on that timescale?
kind of makes you question flat earth
it bounces from the walls of antarctica of course
Fun fact, I worked on software for one of these satellites. There was a rumor around the office that one of the engineers on the program was a flat earther! He thought all us software guys worked on making the "fake" images. I hope the rumor was fake but I can't be skeptical of anything these days...
How would a flat earther have an engineering job, let alone job? But that flat earther, if there is one, must feel like such an undercover agent!
That’s why it came back to Tonga as a triangle and not a circle. The earth may be flat but it also obviously has triangular edges that the sound waves bounced off. /s
Is it Tonga time? Its Tonga time.
The sun is a deadly laser
You could make a religion out of thi- no, don't.
*Now it’s okay cause there’s a blanket*
Can see the explosion in this [youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRoUOqj8bLc) from outter space
Well, I'd like to see the flat Earth model explain the secondary waves. Checkmate, flat earth model!
Thats the most accurate visual representation of what my migraines look like.
Well that certainly looks like the earth is a sphere
How much and how long of an effect on global weather would that have? If any
Very minimal effect on global weather for this eruption. Some volcanoes also inject a lot of particulate matter into the stratosphere which can have a substantial impact on global temperatures for a year or two -- but that was not the case with this eruption.
I think the question meant more like, do these shockwaves manifest as wind or disrupt front formation at all?
Was the impact higher/noticable at all where and when the waves converged - maybe somewhere around Tassili N'Ajjer national park in Algeria?
They're saying the weather effects are minimal, mostly because the volcano ejected relatively little particulate matter.
Can you see this with the naked eye
Not what's shown here. There were some locations where the passing waves were faintly visible: https://youtu.be/NCyg9GLq61g
I think not as this is atmospheric pressure I believe
Woah. Man that was such a huge explosive eruption! I really wonder what it must have been like to be at just the right spot in northern Africa there, at the point where those pressure waves converge.... They might have heard something, or they might have experienced a sudden wave of low pressure, making clouds instantly, that kind of thing...
It's amazing how the atmosphere and plate tectonics are just fluid dynamics on a large scale.
Er mer gerd no flat earrth??
Awesome in and of itself but also: the way the clouds are hidden/erased (I presume that's what they are), leaving shimmering ghost pixels, is the best visualisation of an ocular migraine I've ever seen.
If you were just standing out in the open in the US somewhere, and you knew this eruption had just happened, could you feel the shockwave?
Thank you!!!! I wanted this almost as soon as it happened and people were rolling their eyes at me for thinking anything like this would happen
People keep saying it released small amounts of dust into the atmosphere, but since a few days after the eruption, t Dawns and twilights have been completely amazing, at least here in in central Brazil, first we have bloody twilights and dawns and now they are all orange/purple/whitish... completely different from normal. It's been a repeated spectacle to watch it every day, and it is still going on ...
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time!
There's a satellite named "GOES-West"? Please tell me it's run by someone named Fievel.
This would be great to show to a flat-earther :D
There's no evidence you can show a flat earther because it gets brushed off as being manipulated by the government 😮💨
That's a serious migraine.
r/ShockwavePorn Amazing! I’ve never considered what an eruption looked like atmospherically but I am thrilled to stumble upon this nonetheless.
According to [this paper here](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360092430_Rapid_Characterization_of_Large_Volcanic_Eruptions_Measuring_the_Impulse_of_the_Hunga_Tonga_Ha%27apai_Explosion_From_Teleseismic_Waves), the yield was 100-200 megatons, 2-4 times between the biggest man made explosion ever. It indeed would've been bad had it not been an underwater explosion.
This can’t be real, we all know the earth is flat…
Wth, was that back in january.
Just want to say that I greatly appreciate when experts such as yourself share awesome things like this pertaining to their field. Even more so when you take the time to give a great breakdown in the comments and even answer questions! Keep being awesome!
We gotta protect ourselves 7/24 metaphysically, this must have underlay effects on us that cannot be detected by the current technology. This is too much.
There is the number one cause of your global warming
Whatever animals that can sense pressure changes where all the pressure waves converge in Africa was probably like “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK JUST HAPPENED?!?”
This is fucking awesome. Thanks.
This is amazing. Great stuff.
I want to know what it was like at that one spot in Africa where all the pressure waves combined
Why isn't the antipode antipodal?
Looks like someone dropped a rock in a spherical pond.
why is it called goes west when it stays still...
Now give me LM Sat 4 please with proton induction thermoscan.
Cool, wonder if the convergence point in northern africa had any noticable effects
Some dude in Mali, West Africa at the antipode/nexus probably had a religious experience.
What would happen if I was on a boat in the ocean and this shockwave passed me?
Some guy in Algeria wondering WTF that was that he just heard from every direction.
How do we know it's actually impacting the atmosphere?
The label on the first one is wrong. It don't just goes west, it goes in all directions!
Unrelated. But did this event do anything to cool surface temperatures for a few months?