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Déjà vu: Might Future Eruptions of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcano be a Repeat of the Devastating Eruption of Santorini, Greece (1650 BC)?

2022; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s12583-022-1624-2

1867-111X

Timothy Kusky,

earthquake and tectonic studies

The remote Pacific islands nation of Tonga (about 170 islands, with a population of 105 000), and surrounding countries, are suffering from the damage from one of the largest, most explosive volcanic eruptions in at least several decades, at least since the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines.The data is still coming in from the Jan. 15, 2022 eruption.Initial reports show (remarkably) few casualties, but the islands are still (as of this writing) inaccessible because of thick volcanic ash coverings, loss of communication networks, and damage to the main airport.Initial reports are optimistic, but the observations and data are sparse.Tonga needs help, immediately.Tonga is located in the northern part of the Tonga-Kermadec subduction system, that extends for about 2 550 km between New Zealand and Tonga.It has the deepest trench in the southern hemisphere, and the second deepest in the world.The convergence rate between the Pacific Plate on the east and the Tonga-Kermadec arc to the west is about 15 cm/year (some estimates in the far north suggest it may be 24 cm/year), showing that this trench records the fastest plate velocities on Earth (e.g., van de Lagemaat et al., 2018), which certainly contributes to its long history of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunami.The back arc side of the Tonga-Kermadec arc is extensional, forming a complex back-arc basin system extending from the Lau Basin in the north, to the Taupo volcanic zone in New Zealand in the south (Fig. 1a, inset).The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano (Figs.1a, 1b, 1c) is located in the southern part of the Tonga segment of the Tonga Kermadec arc (Plank et al., 2020;Cronin et al., 2017), and before 2014, consisted of two andesitic islands (Honga Tonga in the northeast and Hunga Ha'apai in the west; Figs.1b,1c)), and have had notable eruptions before this phase in 2014, 2009, 1988, 1937, and 1912 (Smithsonian Museum, Global Volcanism Program, 2022;Bryan et al., 1972).The largest part of the volcano is a giant submarine caldera, located to the SE of the islands (Fig. 2).Some information suggests that Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai has had catastrophic eruptions similar in scale to the 2022 eruption about 1 000, and 2 000 years