The Hunga volcano ushered in 2022 with a bang, devastating the island nation of Tonga and sending aid agencies, and Earth scientists, into a flurry of activity. It had been nearly 140 years since an eruption of this scale shook the Earth.

UC Santa Barbara’s Robin Matoza led a team of 76 scientists, from 17 nations, to characterize the eruption’s atmospheric waves, the strongest recorded from a volcano since the 1883 Krakatau eruption. The team’s work, compiled in an unusually short amount of time, details the size of the waves originating from the eruption, which the authors found were on par with those from Krakatau. The data also provides exceptional resolution of the evolving wavefield compared to what was available from the historic event. The paper, published in the journal Science(link is external), is the first comprehensive account of the eruption’s atmospheric waves.