Volcanic Eruption Was 600 Times More Powerful Than Hiroshima, Many Tongans Went Deaf During Explosion

Zubu Brothers ^ | 1-20-2022

[blam]

Last week’s eruption of the volcano near the Pacific island nation of Tonga was 600 times more powerful than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II. As a result, the eruption was so loud that many Tongans went deaf after the first explosion.

“The first explosion…our ears were ringing and we couldn’t even hear each other, so all we do is pointing to our families to get up, get ready to run,” Marian Kupu, a journalist on Tonga, told Reuters.

The eruption was so loud that it could be heard across the world, even thousands of miles away in Alaska.

“This might be the loudest eruption since Krakatau in 1883,” Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told NPR.

On Tuesday, the first satellite images shared by Maxar Technologies showed the tiny island nation is smothered in volcanic ash, and building structures were destroyed after a tsunami.

Days later, with limited communications due to a severed undersea communications cable between Tonga and Fiji, pictures showed the devastation on city streets.

New Zealand’s 1 News reveals the first look of the streets of Nuku’alofa, Tonga’s capital, coated with ash.

Areas on the water were utterly devastated by the tsunami

The island’s airport was cleared of ash and fixed on Thursday, allowing New Zealand and Australian military transport planes to deliver generators, hygiene supplies, freshwater, and communications equipment.

[cuban leaf]

I used to use the map below to show people that a hiroshima bomb dropped in seattle’s U-district wouldnt even break windows in downtown Seattle, And they are not that far from each other. It was kind of a revelation. Sure, nukes are a bad thing, but kinda like smoking, not really as dangerous as most people think. Of course, when you get into the stuff like the Tsar Bomba, you get into the territory that most people think of when they think of nuclear weapons.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

[larrytown]

At a human level, measuring sounds this “loud” is pointless. The range then becomes something between “wah-wah-wah” and “internal organ damage”.

[PIF]

Am sure if I go back another couple hundred million years back from Wah Wah I could find a bigger one. But what the hell..
—

Wah Wah Springs was the largest know eruption in 4.5 billion years.

The Siberian Traps (the area is covered by about 7 million km2 - 3 million sq mi of basaltic rock, with a volume of around 4 million km3 - 1 million cu mi ;

The Deccan Traps (lava flows is estimated to have been as large as 1.5 million km2 - 0.58 million sq mi, approximately half the size of modern India over a million years) might have been larger - but may have just been the volume of lava flow and that they erupted for 100ds of years. These two events were basalt flows (like Hawaii), not explosive events.

[DrGunsforHands]

I had initially thought it was a VEI 4 or 5, so was surprised when I read it might be a 6. How long does it usually take to figure it out for certain?

[GreenLanternCorps]

I'm thinking Hotblack Desiado and Disaster Area:

“The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all.

Regular concert-goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet – or more frequently around a completely different planet.

Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.

Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band’s public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitation treaties.

This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.”

[NWFree]

Johnny Cash warned about the ring of fire 🤪

[JustaTech]

The Tonga magma chamber itself represented far more explosive power than any nuke in inventory. Therefore the objective of using a warhead would be solely to initiate a release from the magma chamber. A nuke may not be required if you can reach the magma chamber with a conventional warhead on a bunker buster and basically breach nature’s containment.

These breaches occur naturally of course, we call them eruptions. In either case the breach eventually seals up and the eruption episode ends, sooner or later.

The fascinating question none of us can definitively answer is exactly how deep into the earth can we deliver a warhead? Or more precisely, how deep can we deliver the effects of a warhead?

The next fascinating question is why would someone do this to Tonga? Just as a demonstration/test? Or was there a fear that his particular magma chamber was developing the potential to devastate a huge area unless it was pre-emptively pricked?

[fortes fortuna juvat]

Hmmmm. Thirty years ago I read and approved engineering specifications.
...........................................
Not for bridges I hope!

[fortes fortuna juvat]

People forget that the US continued to bomb Japan with conventional bombs after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
..............................................
I recently read somewhere, perhaps here on FR, that the Tokyo bombing was more devastating than either of the A-bomb drops.

[fortes fortuna juvat]

Dresden comes to mind.
..................................
How did Dresden compare to the Tokyo attack in terms of destruction and death?

[Telepathic Intruder]

When your eardrums are blown out, I think it’s permanent. Especially back in the late 19th century.

[cuban leaf]

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/ww2/projects/firebombing/websitemenu.htm

Compares them.

[Menes]

Yes, that’s right. :-)

These were the tactics used by the RAF in Operation Thunderclap (as the attack on Dresden was called). The fateful thing about is was, however the weather: Dresden is situated in the valley of the River Elbe, and the night of the 13th of February 1945 there was a forceful katabatic wind blowing downvalley. needless to say, it was also a very cold wind, i. e. rich in oxygen, and it fanned the flames to an incredible conflagration.

Still, it was less lethal than the Tokyo attack, but of course the Saxon metropolis has always been much smaller than the capital of Japan, in sheer numbers it had about one-tenth of Tokyo’s inhabitants.

Interestingly, the effects of the March 10th ‘45 raid on Tokyo were exacerbated by high winds as well, just as had been the case in Dresden.

[Pelham]

The trigger timing is what I thought was the hard part. The parts have to arrive all at the same instant in order to set off the chain reaction. One of the designs, Fat Man, was an external sphere that needed to be driven into its core. That was the Nagasaki plutonium bomb. Hiroshima Little Boy was something like a uranium bullet going down a barrel slamming into a uranium target.

In the summer of 1945 my mom was an El Paso college student living with her aunt and uncle. One morning her uncle was up before dawn when the sky to the west lit up like the Sun had come up from the wrong direction.

[Menes]

Very interesting. :-)
Saddening, like all accounts of the horrors of war, but interesting nonetheless.

Still, dare I say that whether I had been in Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima or Dresden on these fateful days of the raids, my hope would have been that I had been killed immediately, without having to suffer for a prolonged amount of time.

My last words would certainly have been “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” and I would have been gone. Such an end would indeed have been merciful,

[Toddsterpatriot]

Hehe.

[Pelham]

“the Tokyo bombing was more devastating than either of the A-bomb drops.”

Estimates are 97,000 killed in one night of firebombing.
70,000 to 135,000 in Hiroshima
60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki
Atomic bomb deaths include longer term deaths from radiation exposure.

Atomic bombs prompted Japanese surrender because they were unworldly and Japan did not lose face. It was like submitting to a force of nature and not bowing to an enemy. Otherwise they might never have called it quits. A proud race.

[Pelham]

“Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturitions are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee,
That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles,
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. [drowned out by moaning and screaming]
Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles,
Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts,
And living glupules frart and slipulate,
Like jowling meated liverslime,
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turling dromes,
And hooptiously drangle me,
With crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don’t.”

[Menes]

Oh God Almighty. What an unspeakable sight it must have been.

But were the bombs which fell on Japan really visible that far away, or could your great-uncle rather have witnessed the explosion of the prototype atom bomb, which occurred on July 16th in New Mexico?

[PrairieLady2]

I know of a lady who was there when St. Helens blew. She couldn’t get the sound of it out of her head. So much so that she move as far from volcanoes as she could get.

I remember sonic booms from airplanes as a kid. None of them was ear shattering even as they shook the house.

There was a video going around online from the Tonga eruption. It was so sudden and so sharp I literally jumped when I heard it and a lout WTF! came flying out of my mouth. I’m glad for not being there in person.

The reality of that sound is incomprehensible to me.