An active underwater volcano off the coast of Vanuatu’s Epi Island has erupted after days of seismic activity had been recorded in the area, forcing authorities to divert shipping and aircraft.
“People on Epi and surrounding islands are also advised to stay on alert for any large earthquake associated with the ongoing volcanic eruptions that could trigger a possible tsunami,” they said.
Eruption Big Enough to Trigger Warnings
Submarine senior volcano officer Ricardo William told Radio New Zealand that the eruption was big enough to trigger several warnings.“The volcano activity increased a little bit to explosions that propelled ash to some 100 kilometres that fall around the submarine volcano,” he said.
“We gave advice to the aviation industry as well as the marinas to stay away from the east of Apia island region.”
Eruption Comes a Year After Tongan Explosion
The volcanic eruption in Vanuatu comes just over a year after a massive underwater volcanic eruption in Tonga unleashed an atmospheric shockwave that radiated out at close to the speed of sound.The stratosphere is the layer of atmosphere between 8 and 33 miles above the earth’s surface.
“This event raised the amount of water vapor in the developing stratospheric plume by several orders of magnitude and possibly increased the amount of global stratospheric water vapor by more than 5 percent,” the paper reads.
In a NASA study conducted at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, researchers claim the amount of water vapor released was about 146 teragrams, nearly three times more than the amount cited in the Science study.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luis Millan, an atmospheric scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the NASA report. He led the study of the water vapor brought on by the Tonga volcanic eruption.
In the past 18 years, only two other volcanic eruptions sent “appreciable amounts” of water vapor to such high altitudes—the 2008 Kasatochi event in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile—according to NASA.
Both eruptions were “mere blips” compared to the Tonga volcanic eruption, and the water vapor produced dissipated quickly. Water vapor from the Tonga volcano could remain in the stratosphere for “several years,” NASA said.