Tonga Eruption: NASA Space Scientists Study Submarine Volcano To Understand Landforms On Mars, Venus

NASA scientists have said the Tonga volcano eruption is helping them to understand the creation of landforms on the surfaces of Mars and Venus.

This satellite image shows smoke and ash being released by the Hunga-Tonga - Hunga-Haa'pai volcano just over one week before a massive eruption destroyed most of the island on January 15. (Credit: Handout / Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies / AFP)

New Delhi: Earlier this month, an explosive eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano occurred, triggering a tsunami in the south Pacific ocean. The underwater volcano, also called a submarine volcano, is located near the Kingdom of Tonga, which is an archipelago of nearly 170 islands, 2,000 kilometres northeast of Auckland, New Zealand. 

Now, NASA scientists have said that the Tonga eruption is helping them to understand the creation of landforms on the surfaces of Mars and Venus, according to a Nature article.

The Tonga eruption was an unusual explosion, and it is offering researchers a rare chance to study the interaction of water and lava, the article said. The eruption of the Tonga undersea volcano has been calculated to be more than 500 times the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

High-resolution satellite image of the Tongan island right after it formed, Jan. 19, 2015.
Credit: Pleiades-1A ©2015 CNES Distribution Airbus DS

 

How The Tonga Eruption Is Important For Planetary Science

Petr Brož, a planetary volcanologist at the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, said that studying the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano and its evolution in recent weeks is important for planetary science, according to the Nature article.

He said that the knowledge may help researchers reveal the results of water-lava interactions in the red planet and elsewhere across the Solar System.

Clouds of steam rise from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai as heat from the recently-erupting volcano vaporizes a small crater lake on Janaury 7, 2021. (Credit: Skysat via Planet Labs)

 

How The Tonga Eruption Is Helping Space Scientists Understand Mars, Venus

In early 2015, lava and ash expelled from an undersea volcano began to form the volcanic island in Tonga. This sparked the interest of researchers, including James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US. This is because the volcanic island is similar to structures on Mars and possibly on Venus, the article said.

Garvin and his colleagues were unusually well positioned to study the volcano eruption, according to an article by NASA's Earth Observatory. Garvin and an international team of researchers have been monitoring changes in Tonga ever since new land rose above the water surface in 2015 and joined two existing islands.

Digital elevation model derived from stereo views of a Martian volcano from the HiRISE instrument aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Such small conical islands might have formed in shallow water. (Credit: NASA/JPL/U. Arizona)

 

Quoting Garvin, the Nature article said that people normally do not get to see islands form, but the volcanic island in Tonga offered "a front-row seat". 

Garvin is interested in what the islands may teach us about Mars.

Quoting him, the Earth Observatory article said that small volcanic islands, freshly made, evolving rapidly, are windows in the role of surface waters on Mars and how they may have affected similar volcanic landforms. He added that researchers actually see fields of similar-looking features on Mars in several regions.

Volcanic islands are eroded away in just a few months. However, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai has survived for years, which has allowed Garvin's team to use satellite observations and seafloor surveys to study how such islands form, erode, and persist, the article said.

Using that knowledge, the researchers wanted to understand the mechanism of formation of small conical volcanoes found on Mars in the presence of water billions of years ago.

Volcanic eruptions occurring on land and submarine eruptions are very different. According to Brož, undersea eruptions can form different landforms. 

Also, submarine volcanoes are more violent because of the presence of large quantities of sea water. The water also rapidly cools the lava and restricts the amount of gas emitted from it.

This satellite image taken and released by Maxar Technologies on January 18, 2022 shows two small sections (L and top) of where the Hunga-Tonga - Hunga-Haa'pai volcano used to be visible, three days after a massive eruption destroyed most of the island on January 15, devastating Tonga and causing a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean.
Handout / Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies / AFP

 

Joseph Michalski, a planetary scientist at the University of Hong Kong, said that many volcanoes on Mars are thought to have erupted with steady flows of lava, but some could have been explosive, like the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, according to the article.

He added that the marine environment is similar to some aspects of the low gravity settings in small planets such as Mars and "can shed unique light on Martian features that formed in lower gravity”.

According to NASA's Earth Observatory, all of the new land is gone, along with large chunks of the two older islands.