Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / The Volcano Heard Around the World: Literally!
Transcript
- 0:02SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
- 0:14SPEAKER_01: I am recording Chuck Chuck Chuck.
- 0:16SPEAKER_01: Look at you go.
- 0:18SPEAKER_01: Look at you.
- 0:18SPEAKER_01: You are learning.
- 0:20SPEAKER_01: Chris can do math.
- 0:21SPEAKER_01: I did not how good.
- 0:22SPEAKER_01: I did not know.
- 0:23SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I didn't know you were capable of that.
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: I am.
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: I'm uh I'm extremely capable.
- 0:27SPEAKER_01: How are you doing, Professor Rymink?
- 0:29SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm doing well, Chris.
- 0:30SPEAKER_00: How are you?
- 0:30SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great.
- 0:31SPEAKER_00: I'm excited.
- 0:32SPEAKER_00: Me too.
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: So we're interrupting your currently scheduled broadcast.
- 0:38SPEAKER_00: That's right.
- 0:39SPEAKER_00: With breaking news, I suppose, or a little bit of breaking news.
- 0:42SPEAKER_00: But this is this is news that's been uh all over the place.
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: I mean, every major news channel I've looked at, from The Economist to the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, has had an article on it.
- 0:52SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, first of all, we are talking about the uh volcano that has erupted.
- 0:57SPEAKER_01: It erupted January 15 in in Tonga.
- 1:00SPEAKER_01: And I I asked my geology students, these are really good kids, good students, smart, you know, they're juniors and seniors in high school.
- 1:07SPEAKER_01: I asked them on Monday morning, guys, have you heard about this?
- 1:12SPEAKER_01: And uh maybe three in each class.
- 1:16SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
- 1:17SPEAKER_01: Two or three.
- 1:19SPEAKER_01: What?
- 1:19SPEAKER_01: I'll have to.
- 1:20SPEAKER_01: How can you not?
- 1:21SPEAKER_01: Like it's all over social media.
- 1:23SPEAKER_01: So it really like paints a picture as to like what's on my Instagram feed as opposed to what's on theirs.
- 1:30SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no kidding.
- 1:32SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll have to uh I'll have to try that with my uh you know, grad level isotope geochemistry class.
- 1:36SPEAKER_00: Maybe the graduate students at Penn State have paid more attention to this than the high school seniors, but I truly don't understand.
- 1:42SPEAKER_01: Like, how could you not have heard this?
- 1:45SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean the economist wrote an article about it.
- 1:48SPEAKER_00: It was like why the title was why was this eruption so big, you know, so powerful.
- 1:52SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's kind of all over the place if you're remotely plugged into the geological community.
- 1:57SPEAKER_00: Um but what we're gonna do here, well, you're Chris Bullheis, high school geology teacher extraordinaire, my former teacher, I'm Jesse Ryming, professor at Penn State, and uh this is Planet Geo.
- 2:07SPEAKER_00: We're interrupting our review or summary of water, our water episode series, to talk about this particular volcanic eruption because it happened this past Saturday, uh, as you said, January 15, 2022.
- 2:21SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 2:22SPEAKER_01: We'll pick up back to schedule on next well, next week, Thursday.
- 2:25SPEAKER_01: We'll pick up.
- 2:26SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 2:27SPEAKER_01: So shall we begin?
- 2:28SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about this, man.
- 2:30SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is this is a big deal.
- 2:32SPEAKER_01: So this is a it's called Can I give it a go?
- 2:37SPEAKER_00: Yeah, go for it.
- 2:38SPEAKER_01: Okay.
- 2:38SPEAKER_01: It's called All right, here we go.
- 2:40SPEAKER_01: The Hunga wait a minute.
- 2:42SPEAKER_01: All right, it's called the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha Pai Volcano.
- 2:46SPEAKER_01: I I I actually like Googled it and I I practiced, so I think I'm good.
- 2:51SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
- 2:53SPEAKER_00: It sounded exactly like uh the people on CNN who were talking about it.
- 2:56SPEAKER_00: Sounded so that's good.
- 2:57SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right.
- 2:58SPEAKER_00: And and so what we're gonna what we're gonna do right now, we're just gonna kind of talk about this volcanic eruption, how we detected it, why there's a volcano there, and then sort of wrap up.
- 3:07SPEAKER_00: And this is a currently you know developing story, I think.
- 3:10SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of information that's going to come out.
- 3:13SPEAKER_01: And yeah, this is not done.
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and there's a lot of really top-flight volcanologists who are currently paying a lot of attention to this thing, and that's not us.
- 3:22SPEAKER_00: So maybe at some point we'll get to talk to some volcanologists who actually study this thing.
- 3:26SPEAKER_00: That'd be very cool.
- 3:27SPEAKER_00: But we wanted to wait and see how the story developed to do that, right?
- 3:30SPEAKER_01: Well, let's start first of all.
- 3:31SPEAKER_01: This is a historic eruption.
- 3:33SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is the biggest eruption since Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
- 3:37SPEAKER_01: Um, so that's over a little over 30 years.
- 3:40SPEAKER_01: That um, you know, that's impressive uh if you put that in perspective with how many volcanoes that that uh you know are in the world.
- 3:48SPEAKER_01: And this this was uh like a once in a generation kind of thing, right?
- 3:52SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 3:52SPEAKER_01: Um and it, you know, it's had it's had some like crescendo buildup in the last few months, it's been kind of active, and then all of a sudden, and this was this was incredible because it was picked up by all these weather satellites.
- 4:05SPEAKER_01: This just seemed like without any warning, this tremendous blast, by the way, was audibly heard over 500 miles away.
- 4:16SPEAKER_00: And actually, was I just I saw our article, the air, the uh barometers in Chicago's O'Hare Airport picked up the compression wave passing by.
- 4:25SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, this is massive from the South Pacific all the way to Chicago.
- 4:29SPEAKER_00: But it's really cool about this volcano is is it was actually actively building islands up until this point.
- 4:35SPEAKER_00: So it's sort of building these two small islands, the Honga Tonga and the Honga Hai Pai, were two islands, they were merged together in a later volcanic eruption and then actually kind of blown apart in this eruption and and sort of the collapse caldera kind of collapsed back in on itself.
- 4:49SPEAKER_01: But it is interesting.
- 4:51SPEAKER_01: The the caldera of this most of the caldera of this volcano is underwater.
- 4:57SPEAKER_01: Uh, we can see a one rim of it that connected the two islands, really.
- 5:02SPEAKER_01: The you know, that connection that you just alluded to.
- 5:05SPEAKER_01: But the caldera is five kilometers across, which is you know, that puts it at like four times larger than a Mount St.
- 5:13SPEAKER_01: Helens kind of caldera event.
- 5:16SPEAKER_01: So this is a this is a big deal.
- 5:18SPEAKER_00: Big volcano, big, big volcano.
- 5:20SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 5:20SPEAKER_01: One of the interesting things, you know, if you Google this volcano, you're gonna come up with a lot of different stuff to cipher through.
- 5:26SPEAKER_01: But one of the cool things about this is the instrumented volcanoes that some of the instrumente volcanoes in the Cascades, like Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, and Mount St.
- 5:34SPEAKER_01: Helens, that are heavily instrumented and heavily monitored.
- 5:38SPEAKER_01: Um, they actually picked up these infra sound records, um, which is essentially this is uh it's it's uh sound waves that are far below our audible range to detect it, like a human human range.
- 5:53SPEAKER_01: Um anyway, um they picked this is so cool because they picked it up twice.
- 6:00SPEAKER_01: Okay, the first size or the first infrasound waves were picked up after they traveled about eight eighty five hundred kilometers or fifty three hundred miles, and the the uh the amplitude of these sound waves were much larger.
- 6:15SPEAKER_01: Um and then they picked up the second waves that traveled the other way all the way around the world and came back at these instruments um you know from the other direction, right?
- 6:27SPEAKER_01: And they had to travel 20,000 miles to get there or 32,500 kilometers to get there.
- 6:34SPEAKER_01: Obviously, then after traveling that much further, they were much lower in amplitude, but that is so cool.
- 6:40SPEAKER_01: We got the waves that traveled both ways.
- 6:43SPEAKER_00: It's very cool.
- 6:44SPEAKER_00: I mean, these things are, I think, currently reverberating around the atmosphere.
- 6:49SPEAKER_00: So we're still picking these things up.
- 6:51SPEAKER_00: Um, and that that goes for the tsunami waves, which we'll touch on briefly at the end here as well as the waves generated from the tsunami that ended up hitting Tonga, and and there were tsunami warnings sent out for most of the Pacific, but um, none of them were too major, at least not as major as the Tonga tsunami.
- 7:08SPEAKER_00: But those waves are reverberating around the oceans as well, uh, you know, a couple days later, which is very cool and very traumatic.
- 7:16SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this whole event, you're right, this whole event reminds me of just exactly what drew me into geology in the first place.
- 7:22SPEAKER_01: It's just the the power that that's behind this is just it's too amazing for me.
- 7:28SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, and that's just that was the instant draw for me.
- 7:31SPEAKER_01: I just love this stuff.
- 7:32SPEAKER_01: Even though, like, I I I I do want to just mention, I know that like I'm sure that we don't have a full like um grasp on on the devastation that's happened yet.
- 7:44SPEAKER_01: That's gonna take a while, I think.
- 7:46SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, I know that that maybe some people are suffering like that, and I don't want to belittle that at all.
- 7:50SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying that the power behind this and the explosiveness is just absolutely incredible.
- 7:56SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so where what's the source of that, Chris?
- 7:59SPEAKER_00: Let's talk to the the source of this power.
- 8:01SPEAKER_00: And like many geological processes, we're talking about massive scales of things.
- 8:06SPEAKER_00: But what's the source of this volcanic eruption ultimately?
- 8:09SPEAKER_01: So are you asking, like, why is there a volcano there?
- 8:12SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 8:13SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
- 8:13SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
- 8:14SPEAKER_00: For sure.
- 8:15SPEAKER_01: Well, this goes back to way long ago when we first began this podcast.
- 8:19SPEAKER_01: We did an episode on plate tectonics and what is a tectonic.
- 8:23SPEAKER_00: When we were young and full of vibrant life and all that stuff, right?
- 8:26SPEAKER_00: Way back when.
- 8:28SPEAKER_01: Yes, but that's exactly what's going on here.
- 8:32SPEAKER_01: We have an ocean to ocean convergent plate boundary.
- 8:36SPEAKER_01: So this is the two oceanic crusts that are converging, and the one that is older and colder is subducting or diving down at an at an angle, diving down below the overriding plate.
- 8:51SPEAKER_01: And what happens with this is the as that plate subducts and gets deeper, it heats up.
- 9:00SPEAKER_01: Okay, there's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of heat, and we also talked about this when we talked about geothermal energy and why the earth is hot, you know, the geothermal gradient.
- 9:11SPEAKER_01: Okay.
- 9:11SPEAKER_00: Yep.
- 9:12SPEAKER_01: The important thing that happens with this is that water is driven off that subducting plate.
- 9:19SPEAKER_01: And that that water, it's it's kind of like you know, taking a waterlogged sponge and wringing it out, and that's what this plate is like.
- 9:27SPEAKER_01: There's it's got sediment on it, that's it's got a lot of water that's in the pore spaces and so on, and it's just getting driven off.
- 9:35SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so what that water does, that water, you squeeze that out of the downgoing plate and it goes into the mantle.
- 9:41SPEAKER_00: And what it does there is it induces melting.
- 9:44SPEAKER_00: This is like adding salt to ice, it causes it to melt.
- 9:47SPEAKER_00: You add water to the mantle and it melts the mantle.
- 9:50SPEAKER_00: And we call this dehydration flux melting, and it produces the magma that then eventually migrates up and produces a volcano.
- 9:58SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 9:58SPEAKER_01: You know, and I talk about this with my students too, and and they're this is uh I think a confusing thing because when they think of water, they think of a bucket of water.
- 10:07SPEAKER_01: And if you if you throw a bucket of water on something, you essentially douse it.
- 10:10SPEAKER_01: You don't you don't cause melting, right?
- 10:13SPEAKER_01: But this is water vapor.
- 10:15SPEAKER_01: This is super heated water that's driven off and added to the super hot rock, then, and that causes the rock to partially melt, which generates the magma.
- 10:24SPEAKER_01: So that magma then rises up toward the surface, and that is what leads to volcanoes like the one that just erupted.
- 10:32SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and these are this is again, as we talked about in the tectonic plate episode way back when this causes the ring of fire, all the volcanoes that are all around the Pacific, is a whole suite of subduction zones that are oceanic plates are are dipping down in the mantle, are driving down there, and they're releasing their water, they're pumping out volcanoes, they're pumping out magma through the volcanoes all along this system.
- 10:56SPEAKER_00: And Tonga is is you know just one, in this case, exceptional piece to this big puzzle that is the ring of fire around the Pacific Ocean.
- 11:05SPEAKER_01: So why is this one so violent?
- 11:09SPEAKER_01: What happens with these kinds of volcanoes that lends itself to being this explosive?
- 11:16SPEAKER_00: Well, there's two things.
- 11:17SPEAKER_00: First of all, the size of the magma chamber and the size of how the magma is aggregated, and whether you get a small little blip of magma or a big, voluminous, massive amount of magma erupted very, very quickly.
- 11:30SPEAKER_00: So the composition of the magma matters, the volume of magma matters, and also in this case the interaction with water matters a lot as well, and how that magma interacts with water.
- 11:41SPEAKER_00: So if magma rises slowly into ocean water, you get this sort of layer of steam.
- 11:48SPEAKER_00: There's gas coming out of the magma slowly in this case, and you form this like sort of steam envelope.
- 11:54SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit like a sleeping bag around the thing.
- 11:57SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a little insulation, right?
- 11:58SPEAKER_00: It's a little insulation ring which prevents the magma from really reacting violently with the water.
- 12:05SPEAKER_00: But if you do that too fast, you can't develop the steam envelope.
- 12:10SPEAKER_00: And the magma basically gets this really reactive chemical explosion in the water system.
- 12:16SPEAKER_01: Uh let me ask you a question, uh maybe an analogy, right?
- 12:19SPEAKER_01: Have you ever I get this sometimes with my wood stove, I get that thing cranking.
- 12:24SPEAKER_01: It's red hot, right?
- 12:26SPEAKER_01: The surface of it is hot.
- 12:28SPEAKER_01: If I take any water and spill a few drops onto the surface of that really hot stove, the water pops like crazy right off from it.
- 12:37SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen that?
- 12:39SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's it.
- 12:39SPEAKER_00: And this is a great analogy.
- 12:40SPEAKER_00: Great analogy.
- 12:41SPEAKER_00: Keep going.
- 12:42SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm just saying that like if if the magma moves up faster and it doesn't give the opportunity to build this steam layer, this this kind of water vapor layer between the the magma and the actual water, the ocean itself, it moves up too fast, you don't get that, then you have this big explosion.
- 13:01SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 13:02SPEAKER_00: And so in this case, these volcanoes, geologists have sort of mapped this volcano and understood that around about every thousand years, big eruptions happen.
- 13:13SPEAKER_00: So there's caldera forming eruptions that happen, you know, on a thousand-year timescale, roughly.
- 13:19SPEAKER_00: And then there's a bunch of little volcanic eruptions that happen in between those big cycles.
- 13:23SPEAKER_00: And so the last one was around about a thousand years ago.
- 13:27SPEAKER_00: And so we're kind of due for these big caldera forming eruptions.
- 13:32SPEAKER_00: And remember the difference between a caldera and a crater is that a crater just kind of blows the con the blows rock up in the air.
- 13:39SPEAKER_00: A caldera empties a magma chamber that collapses in on itself.
- 13:43SPEAKER_00: So it's a totally different scale of volcanic eruption.
- 13:46SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 13:46SPEAKER_01: I think you know, you talk about the violence of the eruption, there are really three things at play.
- 13:50SPEAKER_01: One, the magma moved up fast and came into contact, direct contact with the with the water.
- 13:56SPEAKER_01: That lends to explosive eruptions.
- 13:58SPEAKER_01: Two, we have a magma that's that's sticky.
- 14:02SPEAKER_01: Okay, it's it's really thick, it's gooey, it resists flow, which tends to trap gases.
- 14:08SPEAKER_01: And then the third thing that's at play here, too, is that it doesn't erupt violently, uh, very frequently.
- 14:15SPEAKER_01: And there's a general rule with volcanoes that the more infrequent the eruptions are, the more violent they can be when they do go ballistic.
- 14:23SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so every thousand years that makes for relatively big eruptions if it's erupting that infrequently.
- 14:30SPEAKER_00: So the scale of this eruption was pretty big.
- 14:34SPEAKER_00: The power of this eruption, the violence and the the sort of um amount of power released per unit time was pretty extensive.
- 14:42SPEAKER_00: This set shot an ash cloud at least 20 kilometers into the sky.
- 14:45SPEAKER_00: That ash cloud also produced a lot of volcanic lightning, something on the order of 100 bolts per second, which is just totally cool.
- 14:52SPEAKER_00: And and you know, this is a very violent, we're saying cool here, but this is a violent, catastrophic thing that's going on.
- 14:59SPEAKER_00: So uh we're just impressed by the scale of it.
- 15:02SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
- 15:03SPEAKER_01: And I encourage you, if you're listening to this, you need to get online and you need to Google video this.
- 15:09SPEAKER_01: It is you can see the lightning, and it is the volcano is creating this lightning.
- 15:14SPEAKER_01: This is not a weather-related phenomenon.
- 15:16SPEAKER_01: This is created by the electricity that's generated by all the all these fine-grain ash particles that are in the atmosphere.
- 15:23SPEAKER_01: Um, it's amazing seeing this lightning.
- 15:26SPEAKER_01: I mean, my kids were blown away by this, my students were blown away by this watching it, and they're like, whoa, what's all the lightning about?
- 15:33SPEAKER_01: You know, and then it gives an opportunity to talk about that too.
- 15:35SPEAKER_01: So I really encourage everyone that's listening to this to do that.
- 15:39SPEAKER_01: Search this stuff out.
- 15:41SPEAKER_01: It's so cool.
- 15:42SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, just to sort of we should wrap it up here a little bit, but just to end on a bit of a more somber note, that you know, this did cause a tsunami in Tonga that was about 1.2 meters or four feet.
- 15:52SPEAKER_00: And we have yet to sort of really understand the scale of devastation.
- 15:55SPEAKER_00: Certainly there's devastation that occurred in Tonga, and this is a a somber tragedy in many, many places.
- 16:02SPEAKER_00: And we have yet to understand the scale of that, but we're learning more every day, and it's a really geologically interesting phenomenon.
- 16:10SPEAKER_00: And like you said, Chris, something that is uh a generational eruption.
- 16:14SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting too.
- 16:15SPEAKER_01: We closed all or we we had tsunami warnings all up and down the the west coast of the United States.
- 16:21SPEAKER_01: Um, I saw videos of uh the tsunami waves hitting Oregon.
- 16:25SPEAKER_01: Um really a kind of cool thing.
- 16:28SPEAKER_01: It's you know, even though you have only a few feet of a tsunami, you know, three to four feet that hit Oregon, and but the surge that you get from that is so impressive that it would go up to the mouth of a river and just push the river way upstream.
- 16:44SPEAKER_01: So the river actually ref reversed flow almost like a really like a tidal bore was coming in or something like that.
- 16:50SPEAKER_01: Amazing footage of that.
- 16:51SPEAKER_01: Um, and I again I I encourage everyone to to Google video that too because it's pretty impressive.
- 16:56SPEAKER_01: There were in Japan, there was one prefriction prefecture in Japan that had a nine-foot tsunami.
- 17:03SPEAKER_01: Um, and so the you know, the geology of the local geology of the area really plays into the size of the tsunami waves, also.
- 17:12SPEAKER_00: So we'll we'll have more to update, and hopefully we can get a volcanologist on to sort of talk to us about this uh about this eruption in the near future.
- 17:21SPEAKER_00: But it's just a a very interesting and newsworthy geological phenomenon that occurred.
- 17:26SPEAKER_00: So it's definitely worth highlighting.
- 17:28SPEAKER_01: And it is still ongoing, and uh, you know, they they think that they don't know when the end is you know, when when this is gonna stop.
- 17:34SPEAKER_01: It's still erupting violently, sporadically, it might go on for weeks, and it might actually even go on for years.
- 17:40SPEAKER_01: So this could turn into a very long haul here uh for that area.
- 17:45SPEAKER_00: So well, Chris, cool stuff, somber stuff, yes, but definitely one of the reasons we we are interested in geology, that's for sure, in geoscience.
- 17:55SPEAKER_00: So with that, we should wrap it up and say follow us on all the social medias.
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- 18:08SPEAKER_00: We really love that stuff.
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- 18:17SPEAKER_01: Oh, oh Chris, that's your cue.
- 18:22SPEAKER_01: All of a sudden you're pointing at me like That's your cue, man.
- 18:25SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is your this is Hey, we really like it if you would share this with your friends.
- 18:29SPEAKER_01: No, we really do, though.
- 18:30SPEAKER_01: Actually, that's I think you know, that's the number one thing that that helps us out is sharing it with somebody that you think, hey, you know what, they might get something out of this.
- 18:39SPEAKER_00: For sure.
- 18:40SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
- 18:40SPEAKER_00: It's good stuff.
- 18:41SPEAKER_00: All right.
- 18:41SPEAKER_00: All right, see you next week.
- 18:42SPEAKER_00: Cheers, you can't see the biggest.