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We All Nearly Missed the Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert:
She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a "peculiar large mass" floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand. The Kiwi passenger emailed photos of the strange ocean slick to scientists, who realised what it was -- a raft of floating rock spewed from an underwater volcano, produced in the largest eruption of its kind ever recorded.
"We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we've seen on land in the 20th Century," says volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who's co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption. The incident, produced by a submarine volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss. Back in 2012, the raft -- composed of pumice rock -- covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself... for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens -- or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland.
When an underwater robot first sent back detailed maps, one volcanologist remembers that "I thought the vehicle's sonar was acting up... We saw all these bumps on the seafloor... It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van."
"We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we've seen on land in the 20th Century," says volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who's co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption. The incident, produced by a submarine volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss. Back in 2012, the raft -- composed of pumice rock -- covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself... for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens -- or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland.
When an underwater robot first sent back detailed maps, one volcanologist remembers that "I thought the vehicle's sonar was acting up... We saw all these bumps on the seafloor... It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van."
You'd think an explosion that size would be noticed all over the Pacific Rim.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The article couldn't be bothered to actually include any of the photos taken from the plane, but I think you can find one of them here.
A common way to scrub dust and water-soluble gases in industry is known as a wet scrubber, where you either have gas bubbles moving through liquid or liquid droplets moving through the gas, transferring dust and soluble gases into the liquid.
With a subsea volcanic eruption, the ocean is basically a natural scrubber.
BTW, the main impact on the short-term climate from volcanoes is sulfur dioxide, not dust (I say "short term" because the longer-term impact is warming due to CO2 - but in the short term the SO2 greatly overpowers this effect).
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
Since the Havre Seamount is at a depth of 900 to 1200 m, while the critical pressure for water is 218 bar (the pressure at 2200 m depth), steam can form in such an eruption so I would have expected a lot of noise from this event. Did no one with hydrophones notice anything?
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