The recent eruption of the Tongan submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai culminated in an explosive blast on Jan. 15 that sent shock waves around the world. Punching a hole through the stratosphere and venting perhaps a year’s worth of greenhouse gasses into the air, the eruption was hundreds of times more powerful than any bomb Vladimir Putin might throw our way.
Had Tonga erupted perhaps a year earlier, the event would have almost certainly been included in “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond,” a fascinating book by the volcanologist-turned-science-journalist Robin George Andrews. Among its many enthralling encounters with volcanic exotica, we learn of an earlier Tongan eruption from some unnamed, unknown, underwater volcano that in August 2019 released “gas-filled, head-sized blobs of lava” into the South Pacific. Sailors in the area suddenly found themselves “surrounded by a fleet of floating rocks a foot thick and covering an area of 40 square miles.”
