Explosive NASA images show volcano's eruption reached incredible heights

Boom.

The profoundly powerful Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption on Jan. 15 created a jarring appearance on Earth's surface and sent pressure waves around the globe. Now, NASA scientists say the volcano's plume of ash and gas reached a whopping 36 miles up in the atmosphere. That's likely the highest plume ever recorded in the satellite era.

The blast in the South Pacific came from an underwater volcano (Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai are just remnants of the volcanic peak.) As Mashable previously reported, volcanologists suspect that seawater interacting with the volcano's magma (molten rock) beneath the surface ultimately provided this eruption with the pressure for such a massive explosion.

"That's what gave this [eruption] outsized energy, we think," Josef Dufek, a volcanologist at the University of Oregon, told Mashable in January.

All this heat and superheated water "was like hyper-fuel for a mega-thunderstorm," NASA atmospheric scientist Kristopher Bedka told the space agency's Earth Observatory blog. "The intensity of this event far exceeds that of any storm cloud I have ever studied," Bedka added.

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NOAA satellite views show the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption traveling high up into the atmosphere. On the top row, the second image from right shows the plume reaching the mesosphere, before the plume collapsed and spread out. Credit: NOAA / National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)

The blast reached through the atmosphere's troposphere, which exists between the surface and some five to nine miles up in the atmosphere. This is where jetliners fly and our weather occurs. But then it blasted through the next level, the lofty stratosphere, too. That's some 22 miles thick.

Soon after the eruption, the plume reached the mesosphere. Meteors, popularly known as shooting stars, burn up in the mesosphere.

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The great blast, topping off at 36 miles in elevation, was significantly higher than the historic 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. That eruption reached 22 miles, and its sulfur dioxide gases (which soak up and scatter sunlight) had a cooling effect on the world.

The Tonga eruption likely won't cool the Earth. This eruption largely contained water vapor, not absorbent gases. But, as noted above, the eruption still had a global impact. The blast sent shock waves around Earth, multiple times.