Russian satellite captured from space the extent of destruction, showing an entirely destroyed island
An image posted online by Russian space agency Roscosmos has revealed the devastation caused by the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano last week, comparing the border of the two islands before and after the disaster.
Located 65km (40 miles) south of Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu, Hunga Tonga and Hunga Haʻapai were two separate islands connected by land that formed when a powerful submarine volcano erupted in 2015. However, following last week’s explosive eruption, Roscosmos’ imagery shows only a fraction of both islands remains, with significant chunks of both isles, plus the volcanic land in between, wiped out.
NASA stated that the tsunami wave which swept as far as California caused by the volcanic eruption of Tonga, which decimated Tonga, was caused by the volcanic activity. “hundreds of times”It is more powerful than Hiroshima’s 1945 atomic bomb.
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“This is a preliminary estimate, but we think the amount of energy released by the eruption was equivalent to somewhere between 4 to 18 megatons of TNT,” the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Jim Garvin, said in a post on the agency’s website.
This is a huge explosion “hundreds of times the equivalent mechanical energy of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion,”NASA.
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