Joel 2:30-31

 

"I will show wonders in the heavens

    and on the earth,

    blood and fire and billows of smoke.

The sun will be turned to darkness

    and the moon to blood

    before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord."

"and billows of smoke..."

As in the largest ever...

Tonga's strange volcanic eruption was even more massive than we knew

"In December 2021, the volcano—called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai after the two islands that sit on its rim—awoke in a series of tantrums that turned into outright turmoil on January 15, 2022. The peak unleashed a blast so loud it was heard in Alaska, some 6,000 miles away. But much of what happened that day has remained a mystery, until now. Scientists, including the team aboard the RV Tangaroa, are finally putting together the pieces, and the picture that has emerged is mind-boggling."

"As the team announced today, recent surveys of the seafloor suggest that the blast excavated about 2.3 cubic miles of rock.  (the equivalent of 2.6 million Olympic-sized pools). If confirmed, the eruption would be the largest recorded in the last century, surpassing the 1991 blast at Mount Pinatubo."

"The blast jettisoned a plume of searing hot gas and ash 35.4 miles into the sky, higher than ever seen before. It injected an unprecedented 146 teragrams of vaporized water into the atmosphere, which some speculate might result in a slight, temporary warming of the climate. And it sparked a tsunami that surprised scientists when it traveled around the world."

"It's just a massive event," says Kevin MacKay, a marine geologist at NIWA who was also on the RV Tangaroa. "The more we study it, the bigger the event becomes."

"The plume shot 35.4 miles high into a layer of atmosphere called the mesosphere, a zone where most planes can't fly and shooting stars light night skies.

"We've never seen anything get up anywhere near this high before," says Proud, lead author of the paper on the plume height. "It really was quite breathtaking."

"To scientists' surprise, the disturbance spread to oceans around the globe, causing sea levels to rise by a foot in the Mediterranean Sea on the opposite side of the world."

"The explosion was so large that it started making the atmosphere oscillate," says Quentin Brissaud, a geophysicist with the Norwegian Seismic Array and an author on a paper describing the eruption's atmospheric effects.

"As they zipped around the globe, these ripples disturbed the ocean surface in what's known as a meteo-tsunami. The only other time this has been recorded was during the 1883 explosion of Krakatau, one of the most powerful and deadly volcanic eruptions in recorded history."