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How big was the Tonga eruption?

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Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#251

Post by thaumasiotes »

obmelvin wrote: post #182
thaumasiotes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't see the point of your snark. What they did was quite hard for the time. What point are you trying to make?

They set themselves a task that they weren't up to, and they failed at it. It doesn't make sense to say "it is remarkable that they made it", because they didn't make it.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#252

Post by austincheney »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #178

I posted a visualization of the shock wave as a submission, but I"ll repost it here. This is a satellite measurement of integrated atmospheric water vapor (IIUC), so changes in the density of air change the integrated measurement, such that you can see the shock wave travel around half the globe. https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2022/01/22... (it take a few seconds to load, but I believe this is one…

What’s happening immediately east of the eruption? There is a point water vapor variability in the center of the shock wave start and another single point of water vapor variability of equal size without a shockwave.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#253

Post by cjblomqvist »

_moof wrote: post #230
nomel wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the eruption could be heard on the exact opposite side of the globe, where the waves converged? This would have been somewhere around 20.570000, 4.620000, in Guezzam, Algeria, according to: https://www.antipodesmap.com

Not sure if anyone heard it but I know it registered very clearly on barometers in London, so it's not out of the question.

It was apparently registered 3 times on Iceland (almost opposite side of earth) - apparently it was big enough to travel 3 times around the globe!

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#254

Post by sva_ »

graderjs wrote: post #246
LeoPanthera wrote: post #189

Earlier 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.

I love how the helpful engineers of hacker News come to the aid of the poor soul who's inadvertently uploaded their video of the biggest eruption in the last 30 years in the wrong format or without the proper compression. I love that...it's like, 'happy to help to make everything more efficient!' In other news IT still takes days to get back to me about getting my BYO device onboarded... I'm not saying it's a paradox…

> In other news IT still takes days to get back to me about getting my BYO device onboarded...

Perhaps those IT folks are busy procrastinating by optimizing gifs using ffmpeg on HN

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#255

Post by bkor »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #225
LeoPanthera wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My back yard weather station picked up the shockwave here in the bay area: https://twitter.com/DavidCWG/status/1482451910154014720 I had no idea that was even possible. Crazy stuff.

May I kindly ask the make and model of your weather station please?

I noticed the same on all in Aqara Zigbee temperature/pressure/humidity sensors. They're all inside, I could still easily see it twice (many hours apart). Though I only noticed after someone in a Home Automation topic mentioned seeing the effect ;)

Nothing fancy was needed for this, the sensor I'm talking about is battery operated. I have this one: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WSDCGQ11LM.html or this one: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WSDCGQ12LM.html (they look alike too much).

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#258

Post by 2sk21 »

I have been reading Termination shock by Neal Stephenson and this eruption reminded me of the main plot in tat book - injecting sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reduce heating. It will be interesting to track the effect of this eruption downwind.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#260

Post by kingsloi »

dylan604 wrote: post #74
kingsloi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree! I knew the eruption was big (being able to clearly see it from space), but those visuals 1) make me remember how big the Pacific is, 2) how much bigger the eruption was than I originally thought, when overlaid on somewhere I know the relative size of (such as Florida).

Yeah, seeing things above the ocean like that removes human relatable scale. Putting it over land masses that humans can relate changes everything. Now, imagine the struggle with searching for a lost airplane in those same waters. Approaches impossible

It definitely does.

I agree. Not exactly the same, but I live on the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan, and every year/summer, it claims the lives of many people (mainly swimmers). I've watched coast guard helicopters, drones, boats cover (what seems to be) every foot of the few square miles the person was last seen, and still be unsuccessful at finding the missing person. Unimaginable scale when compared to the Pacific!

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