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NASA: Tonga blast was 10 megatons, more powerful than a nuclear bomb
- marcodiego 5y agoNot more powerful than the Tsar Bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
- heavyset_go 5y agoI can't even begin to imagine the scale of utter destruction a 50 Mt bomb like Tsar Bomba can yield if that eruption was 10 Mt.
- ars 5y agoNot as much as you would think - damage is around the cube root of energy, so: (50^1/3)/(10^1/3) = 1.7 times as much damage.
- deeviant 5y agoWhat, exactly, is the formula for "damage"?
- ars 5y agoThere are more exact things, but at a bare minimum "damage" needs to fill the volume it's interacting with, and the volume of a sphere goes up by the cube of distance. It's what led to the development of the smart bomb - they figured out that it's a losing game to increase the power of a bomb - that cube root is painful. So instead they made small, but more accurate, bombs. It's also why the nuclear bomb is not as useful as people think: It's strong, but a large number of accurate, small, smart bombs works better to destroy your target (as opposed to digging holes in the ground).
- tyingq 5y agoThis web page is interesting in that space https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Pick a spot, the yield of the weapon, and it will draw radius circles for the fireball, ionizing radiation, 3 degrees of blast damage, and finally, the broad thermal radiation damage. I imagine there's others with things like fallout, etc.
- dboreham 5y agoThere are books on this (I own one, but don't have it to hand right now), but I suspect it's related to the area within which blast impulse energy is above some threshold (enough to damage stuff to some agreed level).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hdivider 5y agoIn the early nuclear age, DARPA had proposals for a 10,000 megaton thermonuclear weapon [1]. In principle, we can design weapons horrendous enough to crack this entire planet apart forever. Four billion years of life up in smoke (or out in debris, I should say). The question of whether humans are the most intelligent life form on the planet is still under active consideration. :) [1] The Pentagon's Brain by Annie Jacobsen
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pm90 5y agoIf we manage to not kill ourselves, we will ultimately advance into a type 2 civ (and higher), and harnessing enormous amounts of destructive energy for useful work will probably be par for the course.
- ffhhj 5y agoWe won't even need a lot of energy. Changing the trajectory of a few rocks is enough to destroy civilizations on the surface of the planet.
- pm90 5y agoI would assume that we have some sort of planetary defense systems by that point.
- King-Aaron 5y agoReplace "assume" with "hope"
- Dylan16807 5y agoIt takes a lot of energy to aim those rocks.
- 5y ago
- krasin 5y agoJules Verne, The Mysterious Island, 1875, [1] "“This cavern stretches under the island as far as the volcano, and is only separated from its central shaft by the wall which terminates it. Now, this wall is seamed with fissures and clefts which already allow the sulphurous gases generated in the interior of the volcano to escape.” “Well?” said Pencroft, his brow suddenly contracting. “Well, then, I saw that these fissures widen under the internal pressure from within, that the wall of basalt is gradually giving way and that after a longer or shorter period it will afford a passage to the waters of the lake which fill the cavern.” “Good!” replied Pencroft, with an attempt at pleasantry. “The sea will extinguish the volcano, and there will be an end of the matter!” “Not so!” said Cyrus Harding, “should a day arrive when the sea, rushing through the wall of the cavern, penetrates by the central shaft into the interior of the island to the boiling lava, Lincoln Island will that day be blown into the air<...>" 1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1268/1268-h/1268-h.htm#link2HCH0059 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1268/1268-h/1268-h.htm#link2...
- jinto36 5y agoMaybe H.G. Wells loaned his time machine to Verne for a bit?
- nwatson 5y ago[Off Topic] C.S. Lewis' first sci-fi trilogy book "Out of the Silent Planet" was likewise a ripoff, plot wise, of HG Wells' "Man in the Moon."
- aardvark179 5y agoBecause gigantic volcanic eruptions involving pacific islands were completely unknown in the nineteenth century? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora
- _mczl 5y ago[flagged]
- 5y ago
- awb 5y ago> He suspects the explosion was triggered by a sudden change in the subterranean plumbing, which caused seawater to flood in. > "When you put a ton of seawater into a cubic kilometer of liquid rock, things are going to get bad fast," he says. Seems like a catastrophic failure. The Big Island of Hawaii constantly has lava and sea water mixing on small scales. Makes me wonder if it’s at risk of a subterranean breach as well. It seems like this Tonga explosion took nearly everyone by surprise.
- ProAm 5y agoNo one by surprise. But what can you do? There are many places people 'shouldn't live' but the odds are in your favor given a short enough timescale.
- awb 5y agoTo clarify: the timing of the explosion took everyone by surprise, not the fact that it exploded. If there was forewarning I haven’t seen an article about it yet.
- ceejayoz 5y agoIt had been erupting since December, including an explosive one two days earlier (https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/459572/underwater-volcano-hunga-tonga-hunga-ha-apai-erupts-again https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/459572/underwater-volcano...) that prompted a tsunami alert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunga_Tonga#December_2021%E2%80%93January_2022_eruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunga_Tonga#December_2021%E2%8...
- thamer 5y agoThere had been coverage of the eruption between December 29th and January 4th, and landslides due to the island's instability were certainly reported as a possible danger. Among other sources, this was covered extensively by the GeologyHub channel on YouTube which pretty much predicted this collapse.
- pixl97 5y ago
- antishatter 5y agoHow do they estimate megaton equivalent? Just evaluating damage can known soil material?
- oliveshell 5y agoGood question— I assume global seismometer networks can give us a pretty good idea.
- antishatter 5y agoI think you are on to something in addition to the satellite image answer above. The below answer “volume displaced” seems rather pie in the sky.
- pvg 5y agoOne obvious-ish lower bound estimate would be an estimate of the energy required to pulverize a Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai-sized rock into a troposphere-height cloud. Edit: It's not any kind of estimate but the before and after pictures of the first thermonuclear weapon test site look quite a bit like the images from Tonga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike#Detonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike#Detonation That was coincidentally (and somewhat accidentally), a 10 megaton explosion.
- ezconnect 5y agoEstimate the amount of energy to move the volume of materials not there anymore.
- iab 5y agoMore powerful than most bombs
- elevaet 5y agoYeah, the biggest bomb ever detonated for eg, Tsar Bomba[0], was 50-58 megatons. It's chilling to remember militaries have had the tech for some time now to direct a blast bigger than Tonga right overhead a city. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
- echelon 5y agoMultiple such blasts, potentially.
- Waterluvian 5y agoHow quickly was the energy released? Was it a sudden impulse or was it over a period of time?
- heavyset_go 5y agoHere's a seismogram of the event[1]. I don't know if there's a correlation between the results and the rate of energy release, but I feel like there might be. [1] https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2022/01/tongan-volcanic-eruption-registers-on-mount-hood-earthquake-monitors-plus-3-bonus-charts.html https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2022/01/to...
- Waterluvian 5y agoOkay so this was very much an eruption over hours and not some catastrophic bomb like pressure release in seconds. Thanks!
- ceejayoz 5y agoNo. Big eruptions are generally preceded and followed by smaller eruptions and earthquakes, but there was a catastrophic explosion here; you can see the shockwave hitting Tonga at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shl11xAQ_aI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shl11xAQ_aI. You can also see it in the satellite footage; the mushroom cloud spreads many miles within minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB0tuaZ9imk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB0tuaZ9imk This was more Mt. St. Helens-style sudden explosive than Hawaii-style fountains.
- iSnow 5y agoWell, it did create quite the bang: https://twitter.com/DAJOOCE_/status/1482445576864079873 https://twitter.com/DAJOOCE_/status/1482445576864079873 (best on headphones or good speakers, turn up the volume for an immersive experience.) So yes, it was real violent.
- dylan604 5y agoa bit of randomness: i tried to click the seismo image like it was a soundcloud embed. doh! now i want to find one of those apps that'll turn an image into sound.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 8bitsrule 5y agoAlmost as big as the 1954 Bikini A-test - about 9 degrees N of it. Which may be what they're using to calibrate the size.
- jostmey 5y agoThe Tonga explosion is more powerful than a fission bomb but the same magnitude as many thermonuclear bombs. Imagine multiple Tonga explosions over major population centers, and you begin to understand the horrors of these weapons
- chii 5y agobut the tonga explosion doesn't release radioactive fallout - just ash fallout which disappear after a "while". So nuclear weapons are still worse.
- cryptodan 5y agoImagine that kind of explosion next to an island like that if Taiwan. Remember water was used when above ground tests were banned.
- dumbfoundded 5y agoNukes also: * Create EMP blasts potentially disabling electronics over larger areas. * Start fires in every direction for miles beyond the blast zone. * Delegitimize nuclear energy. Sort of indirect but fear of nukes is why we don't invest heavily in safe fission alternatives with no weapons path. * Have no real theoretical limit. 50MT has been donated. Designs have been shown up to 10GT.
- themodelplumber 5y agoWas there any news about EMP this time? I thought I read that this was theoretically possible with volcanoes.
- zaarn 5y agoI don't think Vulcanoes usually produce an EMP, however, we did record quite a number of lightning strikes around the vulcano. If memory serves, the area around the vulcano was struck in excess of 200'000 times per minute at the height of the ejecta's activity.
- tehjoker 5y ago* some nuclear bombs (largest detonated: 50 MT, largest designed: 100 MT)
- avalys 5y agoThe US had approximately 500 B-41 nuclear bombs, each with a nominal yield of 25 megatons. It left service in 1976. Today the largest in the US arsenal is the B83 at 1.2 megaton.
- dylan604 5y agolargest for bomber delivery? I would think that ICBM delivered payloads would be higher. did a quick search, but wiki's article only gave numbers on range distances. I didn't see any megaton ratings in the time willing to spend on it. edit: i realize now that the numbers floating around in cavity between my ears was in kilotons. that's why the megaton numbers seemd low to me.
- khuey 5y agoThe really big weapons come from an era when delivery systems were really inaccurate and so you'd drop an absurdly big explosion somewhere near your target. Once you can hit your target reliably you go with a smaller explosion that's still sufficient to destroy it when dropped on top of it and you stick multiple independent warheads on the same missile.
- chii 5y agothose huge multi-decile megaton bombs are probably less useful than the same amount of materials made into many more smaller bombs. Megaton bombs are really only useful in bombing civilian targets tbh. Military targets tend to be small, and spread out over a large area, and smaller bombs makes more sense for those targets.
- wk_end 5y agoFor MAD purposes, isn't bombing civilian targets is just as or more useful than taking out military targets? Is that not the case, or do militaries envision nuclear war not immediately entering a MAD scenario?
- elzbardico 5y ago
- solveit 5y agoDoes that mean artificial tsunamis are on the table?
- chii 5y agoit has always been on the table.
- ridgeguy 5y agoHere's a doomsday nuclear torpedo intended to create enormous radioactive tsunamis at coastal targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_...
- iSnow 5y agoI don't think it would create a tsunami, it's all about the nuclear bang.
- godmode2019 5y agoFrom what I have read its best to blow them on a fault line or near a underwater mountain to create a landslide. The power of the blast itself is not powerful enough to have any real damage.
- detaro 5y agoA problem is also that the power is used ineffectively. For a tsunami you want to get a lot of water moving in your wave, a naked under-water explosion wastes a lot of energy on making steam and causing impressive fountains.
- jon_richards 5y agoThis reminds me of one of the hardest lessons I ever learnt from college worksheets. We were asked whether a cell’s ribosomes fit in the cell normally or if they required compression of some sort. Subtracting the total volume of ribosomes in a cell from the total volume of the cell itself, we got a negative number, and indicated there must be some sort of compression. Almost everyone got marked wrong. A simple difference, lacking context, is not a useful measure. What we should have calculated was a ratio. It seemed arbitrary, but the entire class was a crash course towards scientific writing and everything was graded as if up for review. Picking the right metrics, assumptions, and descriptive language was crucial.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoThis is interesting but... how does it remind you of that? i don't follow in the slightest
- jon_richards 5y agoThe headline just didn’t convey any sense of scale to me. I found this metric much more interesting: > 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.
- sterlind 5y agowhich is funny, because 10 megatons intrinsically conveys scale. it's equivalent to 10 million tons of TNT.
- mrleinad 5y agoI never bothered to look it up, but that still tells me nothing. Is everyone into what's the destructive power of one ton of TNT but me? All I can think of when I read TNT is some old cowboy movie where they threw TNT cartridges around, or some cartoon.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jcims 5y agoI'm morbidly curious to see if there will be any footage of the big eruption. Everything I've seen so far appears to be from the previous eruptions in Dec and Jan. I'm sure many of them aren't visible but lightining detectors counted 5-6k strikes per minute for the first few minutes. ~190k total. I can't imagine.
- jondwillis 5y agoIs this what you’re looking for? satellite footage: https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/1482280041799385092?s=20 https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/14822800417993850... https://youtu.be/u-OfbNwWjDc https://youtu.be/u-OfbNwWjDc
- Fordec 5y agoThat's all from space. I'm guessing they mean, as I also mean, on the ground footage that isn't getting off the island yet due to the connectivity issues.
- pwg 5y agoIt was captured by weather satellites. Someone put together at least one video of the explosion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMRwyNhqJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMRwyNhqJ4
- an-allen 5y agoThere is some footage from the ground. The space footage is time lapse so it happened a lot slower in real time. It was actually multiple eruptions in rapid succession in random directions. I have not seen one of the initial eruption though.
- mynameishere 5y agoCompare to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_a... The total physical work done MW (and thus energy) by the quake was 4.0×10^22 joules (40 ZJ),[31] the vast majority underground, which is over 360,000 times more than its ME, equivalent to 9,600 gigatons of TNT equivalent (550 million times that of Hiroshima)
- ezconnect 5y agoScott Manley has a great video about it talking about the atmospheric pressure recorded during the eruption and it is amazing to watch the pressure wave travel around the world.
- smegsicle 5y agoI want to know who keeps changing their wikipedia page to past tense
- rootusrootus 5y agoFor comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens was about 24 megatons.
- throwawayboise 5y agoShortly after the eruption I was seeing estimates of 100--150MT thrown around; bigger than Tsar Bomba, smaller than Krakatoa. Edit: the Mount St. Helens eruption was about 25 MT total energy released.
- aaron695 5y ago
- rgbrenner 5y agoIf that was 10mt, imagine tsar bomba at 50mt. The Cold War was a crazy time.
- panny 5y ago>"This is just a horrible event for the Tongans," he says. But "it could be a benchmark, watershed kind of event in volcanology." What I find most curious about this event is that nobody seems to really care about... the Tongans. No charity drives. No on the ground footage and interviews of news crews rushed to the scene. 100,000 people just had their lives destroyed and everyone is "cool! how big was it? this is great for science!"
- mattigames 5y agoThe reports mention only 3 deads and around 100 houses destroyed, the problems affecting the full 100K population are damage to communication infrastructure, nothing about all of them losing their homes, the New Zealand government is already sending aid, and tonga government does not want a wave of foreign aid workers as Tonga is of the few places that has avoided a covid outbreak. Source: https://www.9news.com.au/national/tonga-volcano-tsunami-updates-death-toll-homes-destroyed-in-unprecedented-disaster/de40a853-3617-4ab7-a4f0-7f3280e999ff https://www.9news.com.au/national/tonga-volcano-tsunami-upda...
- satori99 5y agoThe Australian government has sent P-8A Poseidon and C-130J Hercules aircraft to surveil damage at the request of the Tongan government. And the HMAS Adelaide is about to leave Brisbane with relief supplies and should get there in a few days. The New Zealand government is doing likewise. They are not being left to fend for themselves.
- kzrdude 5y agoYou can follow along with the news for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/19/tonga-volcano-eruption-first-aid-shipments-leave-fears-aid-workers-could-bring-tsunami-of-covid https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/19/tonga-volcano-...
- elzbardico 5y agoTonga is a tiny island country in the middle of the pacific that lost its main communication channel as the suboceanic cable that connected it with the rest of the world was damaged after the eruption. As it is a tiny country, there are no permanent BBC or CNN offices there with satellite equipment. As it was a volcanic eruption, air travel was severely restricted due to the ash both in the atmosphere as well as in the single airstrip that serves the nation's main island. Help is being dispatched both by The Australian and New Zealand governments (the closest nations to Tonga) by ship. There's also the complication that Tonga was basically spared from COVID, and thus has a population immunologically naive other than from the current vaccines which are not that great against the current dominant variants in circulation, so, there's a great level of care that needs to be taken to ensure that the relief effort doesn't backfire by triggering an outbreak.
- dboreham 5y agoHmm. Ivy Mike 10.4Mt near water detonation. Did that cause a 1m tidal wave across the eastern pacific? (No) Wondering if they're thinking about only the atmospheric blast energy.
- EdwinRobbins 5y agoThe Mike Shot was a surface detonation whereas Tonga was subterranean. So it doesn't lend itself well for comparison of yield and wave production.
- kanzenryu2 5y agoObvious question is how much water has to touch how much magma to yield that much energy?
- tagoregrtst 5y agoDivide 10MT by the enthalpy of vaporization of water? I guess it would be an estimate on the order of the estimate that the eruption was 10MT
- marhee 5y agoI wonder how much greenhouse gas (CO2, etc) is emitted by such an eruption. Would it contribute significantly to global warming?
- Neil44 5y agoThat's an interesting question. I am not sure if there is a process where any significant CO2 would be generated directly in this event. However, dust in the atmosphere tends to cause global cooling.
- ceejayoz 5y agoVolcanoes have a net cooling effect, due to the ash blocking sun and sulphur dioxide being an anti-greenhouse gas. There’ve been global temperature drops after big ones.
- oblio 5y agoAnd in the spirit of our species, instead of solving the problem we'll probably try to find a way to blow up remote volcanoes. Volcano Blaster, Sponsored by BP.
- ceejayoz 5y agoNeal Stephenson's latest novel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) - involves seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide. (Not via volcanoes, but there's definite discussion of the idea.) There's some recent pushback against it, too. https://www.ids.ac.uk/news/scientists-call-for-international-non-use-agreement-on-solar-geoengineering/ https://www.ids.ac.uk/news/scientists-call-for-international...
- harshreality 5y ago> The phenomena and effects of airblast, ground shock, thermal radiation, cratering and ejecta, and debris cloud and deposition from the eruption of Mt St. Helens were compared to those that would result from a nuclear explosion to determine if phenomena or effects were analogous and thus might provide useful data for military nuclear weapon effects studies. It is concluded that the phenomena are not analogous. In particular, airblast destruction was caused by clouds of ash driven by subsonic winds, rather than by a supersonic shock wave that would be the-damage mechanism of a nuclear explosion. Because of the lack of analogy between the eruption and nuclear explosion phenomena, it appears questionable that any of the effects are analogous; therefore, it is unlikely that anything more of military interest can be gained from studying the effects of the eruption. However, key contacts for further information on the eruption and the associated research studies are given. The comparison of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens to the explosion of a 10- to 20-megaton nuclear weapon is misleading. Such comparisons serve no useful purpose and should be avoided. [1] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA112420.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA112420.pdf
- Taek 5y agoEven though the damage types are not analogous people still want a crude metaphor for how "big" the blast was. Since people are going to compare it to a nuke regardless you might as well have some rough criteria for how a comparison could happen.
- kshacker 5y agoWhy are people going to compare to a nuke? Because the media uses those terms. Maybe we need to suggest alternatives. Also since 1945, had there been just a single size of nukes? I may not have a sense of how big a Hiroshima nuke was as compared to a 1975 nuke vs a 2022 nuke. Just saying ... a better comparison (which I don't know as I am not a subject expert) could be developed. Maybe "enough energy to melt 1980 Antarctica" or some other similar scary comparison. Maybe "10 times the energy of hurricane Katrina" Edited the last 3 words
- Jabbles 5y ago
- jug 5y agoYeah, not surprised given the satellite images there. ;-) It's how I imagine setting off a nuke of the larger kind would look like.
- ricardobayes 5y agoIs there a remote chance this is why we have such foul weather ever since the blast? I have cross-checked a few places and it seems everywhere is relatively cooler than what it should be. Even Dubai and Miami have rain, cloudy and storms. Same here in my place which has seen uncharacteristic wind, rainfall and cloud cover since last week.
- ejolto 5y ago> everywhere is relatively cooler It's warmer than the same date last year where I am. Comparing with the maximum temperatures of last year. - January 13th 2022, the day of the explosion was 6.4 C warmer - January 14th 11.6 C warmer - January 15th 6.7 C warmer - January 16th 9.1 C warmer - January 17th 1.4 C warmer - January 18th 2.2 C warmer The difference is even more extreme if I compare the minimum temperatures. There has been more rain, but that is to be expected when the weather is warmer (in my region).
- jffry 5y agoI understood this assertion differently from the comment you replied to: "it seems everywhere is relatively cooler than what it should be" AKA it's cooler than the "normal" temperature, where "normal" is something like mean / median for that day over the past 10/20/50 years or whatever.
- ejolto 5y agoI understood it the same way, the mean data for the past x years was however more difficult to find, and they seem to do a mean per month or year so not fined grained enough for 1 week.
- thehappypm 5y agoIt rains almost every day in Miami
- xg15 5y agoIncoming conspiracy theory: It actually was a nuke test disguised as an eruption, etc etc...
- tagoregrtst 5y agoIts probably been done before. But, in this case, who did this test that none of the five major nuclear powers wouldnt cry out foul?
- tagoregrtst 5y agoTsar bomba was detuned to 50 Mega tons from 100. The US deployed 25 MT bombs. Modern nukes are smaller because the delivery systems are better (a MIRV with ten 1 MT does more damage and is more reliable that a single 25 MT warhead) Honest Q: in geological standards, was this even a big blast?
- Merad 5y agoVolcanic eruptions are rated on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 8. It looks like there hasn't been a formal rating assigned to Tonga yet, but it's believed to be the largest of the 21st century so far, and there was already a VEI 5 in 2011. A VEI 8 is the eruption of a super volcano like the Yellowstone caldera, so obviously it would make Tonga look like a firecracker in comparison. If you consider asteroid impacts as geological events then they can be substantially larger.