![]() It will take time, he believes, to get a true estimate of the size of the Tonga eruption: "When the teams all get together and put these numbers together, the energy balance will come out," he says. But it does not include other forms of energy, such as the energy released by the water turning to steam as it touches molten rock, or magma. "Our estimate is based on moving stuff," he says. That island had been closely monitored since it first formed in 2015, and Garvin says he believes the group's calculations are accurate for the energy required to obliterate it. His team's calculations are based purely on the energy required to destroy the island around the volcano. "We have to be careful to compare it to a nuclear explosion, because it's a different process," Garvin says. Jim Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who made the original estimate, is more cautious. "I think these estimates are underestimating the yield," he says. Science NASA scientists estimate Tonga blast at 10 megatons Although the test-ban treaty has yet to enter into force, the organization has set up an extensive network designed to watch for signs of a nuclear blast. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) was set up in 1996 to monitor for nuclear weapons tests anywhere on Earth. Radioactive fallout, the telltale sign of a true nuclear explosion, was not detected at any station. "It's the biggest thing that we've ever seen."Īs large as the explosion was, it was not nuclear in any way, Le Bras adds. "Every single station picked it up," he says. It was the loudest event the network had detected in more than 20 years of operation, according to Le Bras. In total, 53 detectors around planet Earth heard the low-frequency boom from the explosion as it traveled through the atmosphere. The shock wave from the blast was so powerful that it was detected as far away as Antarctica, says Ronan Le Bras, a geophysicist with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria, which oversees an international network of remote monitoring stations. The explosive volcanic eruption in Tonga on Saturday appears to dwarf the largest nuclear detonations ever conducted, according to a global group that monitors for atomic testing.
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