This is amazing, and superimposing it over other land masses really helps to illustrate the point. I think it would be incredibly helpful to compare it to interstellar events from comets, especially to the (supposed) impact of the comet from Don't Look Up...
How big was the Tonga eruption?
201–210 of 269 posts
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even exactly on the other side of the world, the sound will reach you at different times from different directions due to different pressures, temperatures, mountains, etc. on the way.
But there would be a spot where the pressure waves would cross?
Sounds like the hairy ball theorem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem)
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US? My guess would be population density. The US has ~330M people, Europe has ~748M.
US is more dense though (going by www.worldometers.info). I think these explanations “why we can’t have good things” are too simplistic. Ignore rail and fiber for a second, and look at commuter air travel for example: European market is much more competitive and prices are much lower than for comparable flights in the US.
I think you should double check, that sounds reversed. US and Europe have similar area but Europe has quite a lot more people.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they had incredible techniques. They could detect a remote island by the way the swell is disrupted. Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it.
> Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it. Well, they didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage > Of the 270 men who left with the expedition, only 18 or 19 survivors returned. A 93% mortality rate really isn't a success by any metric. Losing 80% of your ships is nothing to be proud of either.
By any metric related to exploration they were wildly successful. The amount of information that was gathered and relayed on a single voyage at that point in history was astounding, and the story was incredible.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#205Wondering if any ships were destroyed by the eruption the scale makes me think there had to be? Could Volcano eruptions be Earth's way of stabilizing climate change? i.e. sea water gets warmer and is no longer keeping the eruptions from occurring. Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere?
I'm no expert but I can't think of many reasons for a boat to be there.
I remember reading about that Malaysian flight that got lost few years ago in the indian ocean and apparently this area is so uncommon that the closest ships are often more than 1 thousand kilometers away.
The only ships that could be there would be local, but there was an eruption and tsunami alert issued the day before, so I guess that would only leave ships doing work related to the volcano itself.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#206This is an excellent lesson in how shitty my sense of geographic scale is. I would have guessed that the size of the eruption was on par with the size of a small city.
The Pacific Ocean is ginormous (I think that’s the technical term?) I often find myself surprised when I spin a globe (physical or virtual) and compare the expanse of the ocean to my neighborhood of the planet. The scale also makes the history of Polynesian seafaring all that more incredible.
I recently read a book about South America and learned there’s genetic evidence Polynesians made there in about AD 1200, which is amazing.
There’s also I think some mystery about some South American DNA that doesn’t support the land bridge hypothesis. I don’t know if that’s well supported or not/evidence might be poor, haven’t bothered to do any digging. I think that’s distinct from what was found linking some populations to Polynesians and suggests there might have been seafaring people that made it even earlier, but I’m not sure.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#207Heard it go bang, 2600km away, echoing through the hills around our place at the top of the South Island of New Zealand. That's pretty staggering to think about it. Then to see other peoples Home Assistants around the world pick up the change in pressure on opposite sides of the planet. Mental, just mental...
I live on the beach on the East coast of Australia. We had a marine tsunami warning. We were a few floors up so I wasn't really worried about myself.
About 12ish hours after the initial eruption I thought that anything that was going to happened had all passed by hours ago and I was talking with friends online.
Randomly I started hearing this white noise kind of sound (it sounded like the bubbling water of a kettle without any whistling). I took my headphones off and opened my door trying to find the source of the noise, thinking that the kettle had turned on.
I looked outside and what was small surf conditions only 3 minutes before was extremely turbulent with white frothy waves moving in every direction. It looked like it was reacting to an earthquake but there was no movement in the ground. (I've felt an earthquake there before which is rare here but since our foundations are in the sands I've had the experience and could tell there was no earthquake in the ground on the morning after the eruption)
Since the waves were moving in every direction, some of them were colliding head on. When this happened and the peaks and troughs were interacting in the right way they were shooting out jets of water spray at my eye level about 15m above sea level (I could tell since they were intersecting the horizon from my perspective).
It continued for about a 30 seconds, calming down over another 30 seconds. After the surf had lowered itself to its previous levels, the whole top of the water going back about 50ish meters was covered in thick brown foam. All of the turbulent waves had dredged up the sand beneath it.
The foam slowly disappeared over about an hour with the last bits being the foam that ended up getting washed ashore and out of the water's reach.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
139MB is utter insanity for an animated GIF. Crushing it with gifsicle can get it down to 125MB but clearly GIF is the wrong choice of format here. Here's a HEVC compressed video version which is only 25M and suffers only extremely mild softness: http://david.gloveraoki.net/f/32M.mp4 It would probably be even better if I could work with the source video and not the gif version.
idk, I had no issues loading the gif and playing it. For some reason your video doesn't want to play in Chrome. I had to download it first.
Back when I had a 500MB data plan, a partner sent me an 80MB gif which kicked me offline for several days. It's good to warn people about large files.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
idk, I had no issues loading the gif and playing it. For some reason your video doesn't want to play in Chrome. I had to download it first.
Back when I had a 500MB data plan, a partner sent me an 80MB gif which kicked me offline for several days. It's good to warn people about large files.
That's a good point! Didn't think about that.
Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?
#210Wondering if any ships were destroyed by the eruption the scale makes me think there had to be? Could Volcano eruptions be Earth's way of stabilizing climate change? i.e. sea water gets warmer and is no longer keeping the eruptions from occurring. Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere?
> Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere? Interesting, this prompted me to read[1] into how it works and made me interested in why we don't pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to help cool down the planet and buy us more time to transition off of CO2/CH4 emitting processes? Is it cost prohibitive? We already cloud seed pretty often so there's infrastructure in place for a…
I've just finished reading "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson, which explores this very concept.