Questions Just Keep Erupting from the Hunga Tonga Volcano
Writing in the journal Nature, UK researchers Michael Cassidy (University of Birmingham) and Lara Mani (University of Cambridge) call for supporting more research to understand, forecast, and monitor extreme volcanic risk and to model potential impacts.
Based on past geologic history, Cassidy and Mani calculate the probability of an eruption 10 to 100 times larger than Tonga is one in six within this century and that “the world is woefully unprepared for such an event.” A so-called magnitude seven eruption would cause massive and abrupt climate change of a scale that has caused the collapse of some previous civilizations. e last truly big event was the Tambora eruption of 1815 that killed 100,000 people outright and caused a “year without summer” as a drop in global temperature resulted in worldwide crop failures. At that time, the global population was eight times smaller than today.
Cassidy and Mani note the U.S. government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into exploring potential impacts of a massive asteroid strike on Earth and how to divert one, yet a cataclysmic volcanic eruption is hundreds of times more likely, with no coordinated research eorts or investments into forecasting and mitigation across a range of economic and social sectors. ey urge us to use the Tongan eruption as “a wake-up call” to spur investment into modeling impacts in “our globally connected world.”