(Press-News.org) When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022 in the South Pacific, it produced a shock wave felt around the world and triggered tsunamis in Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru and the United States. It also changed the chemistry and dynamics of the stratosphere in the year following the eruption, leading to unprecedented losses in the ozone layer of up to 7% over large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the University of Maryland.
Driving those atmospheric changes, according to the research, was the sheer amount of water vapor injected into the stratosphere by the undersea volcano. The location of the stratosphere is approximately 8 - 30 miles above Earth’s surface and is where the protective ozone layer resides.
“The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption was truly extraordinary in that it injected about 300 billion pounds of water into the normally dry stratosphere, which is just an absolutely incredible amount of water from a single event,” said David Wilmouth, a project scientist at SEAS and first author of the paper.
“This eruption put us in uncharted territory,” said Ross Salawitch, professor at the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and co-author of the study. “We’ve never seen, in the history of satellite records, this much water vapor injected into the atmosphere and our paper is the first that looks at the downstream consequences over broad regions of both hemispheres in the months following the eruption using satellite data and a global model.”
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption was the largest explosion ever recorded in the atmosphere. The eruption hurled aerosols and gases deep into the stratosphere. Some material reached the lower mesosphere, more than 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, altitudes never recorded from a volcanic eruption. Previous studies found that the eruption increased water vapor in the stratosphere by 10% worldwide, with even higher concentrations in some areas of the Southern Hemisphere.
Wilmouth, Salawitch and the rest of the research team used data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) aboard the NASA Aura satellite, to track not only how that water vapor moved across the globe but also monitor temperature and levels of chlorine monoxide (ClO), ozone (O3), nitric acid (HNO3), and hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the stratosphere for the year following the eruption. They then compared those measurements to data collected by MLS from 2005 to 2021 prior to the eruption.
The team found that the injection of water vapor and sulfur dioxide (SO2) changed both the chemistry and the dynamics of the stratosphere.
In terms of chemistry, the SO2 led to an increase of sulfate aerosols, which provided new surfaces for chemical reactions to occur.
“Certain reactions that might not happen at all or only happen slowly can happen faster if there are aerosols available on which those reactions can take place,” said Wilmouth. “The injection of SO2 from the volcano allowed sulfate aerosols to form and the presence of water vapor led to the additional production of sulfate aerosols.”
The increased sulfate aerosols and water vapor kicked off a chain of events in the complex atmospheric chemistry that led to widespread changes in the concentrations of a number of compounds, including ozone.
The extra water vapor also had a cooling effect in the stratosphere, leading to a change in circulation, which drove decreases in ozone in the southern hemisphere and an increase of ozone over the tropics.
The researchers found that the peak decrease in ozone occurred in October, nine months after the eruption.
"We had this enormous increase in water vapor in the stratosphere with modest increases in sulfate that set off a series of events that led to significant changes in temperature and circulation, ClO, HNO3, HCl, O3, and other gases," Wilmouth said.
Next, the researchers hope to continue the study by following the impact of the volcano into 2023 and beyond as the water vapor moves from the tropics and midlatitudes to the Southern Hemisphere pole, where it has the potential to amplify ozone losses in the Antarctic. The water vapor is expected to stay elevated in the stratosphere for a period of several years.
The research was co-authored by James Anderson, the Philip S. Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at SEAS, Freja Østerstrøm and Jessica Smith. It was supported in part by NASA under Grant No. 80NSSC19K0326 and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1764171.
END
Massive 2022 eruption reduced ozone levels
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano changed the chemistry, dynamics of Earth’s stratosphere
2023-11-20
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Remarkably detailed view of “teenage galaxies” from just 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang revealed by JWST
2023-11-20
Pasadena, CA—Galaxies that formed just 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang are unusually hot and glow with light from surprising elements, like nickel, according to new work led by Carnegie’s Gwen Rudie and Northwestern University’s Allison Strom. Studying “teenage galaxies” from the ancient universe can teach scientists about how these massive systems of stars mature and evolve.
Their findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, are part of the CECILIA (Chemical Evolution Constrained using Ionized Lines in Interstellar Aurorae) ...
Litigating the Pandemic
2023-11-20
When the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the United States, healthcare workers faced new demands, childcare and grocery store workers became essential workers, businesses shut down, and churches and school doors closed. The pandemic also arrived amidst protests over police violence. Deep partisan divisions and record natural disasters amplified these challenges. The national government offered new funding for businesses and individuals and public health guidance, and local governments issued guidelines for gathering in public.
Litigating the Pandemic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), a new book by Susan Sterett, professor ...
Personalized cancer medicine: humans make better treatment decisions than AI
2023-11-20
Treating cancer is becoming increasingly complex, but also offers more and more possibilities. After all, the better a tumor’s biology and genetic features are understood, the more treatment approaches there are. To be able to offer patients personalized therapies tailored to their disease, laborious and time-consuming analysis and interpretation of various data is required. Researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now studied whether generative artificial intelligence ...
Genomic study links cannabis abuse to multiple health problems
2023-11-20
New Haven, Conn. — A Yale-led analysis of the genomes of more than 1 million people has shed light on the underlying biology of cannabis use disorder and its links to psychiatric disorders, abuse of other substances such as tobacco, and possibly even an elevated risk of developing lung cancer.
For the study, researchers examined a genome-wide set of genetic variants in individuals from multiple ancestry groups enrolled in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Million Veteran Program, one of the world’s largest genetic databases, and ...
Younger people are more vulnerable to the effects of cardiovascular risk associated with high blood cholesterol and hypertension
2023-11-20
Young people may be more susceptible to the effects of the risk factors for developing atherosclerosis. According to a study carried out at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC), younger people are especially vulnerable to the damaging effects of elevated blood cholesterol and hypertension, two of the major modifiable cardiovascular risk factors.
These findings, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, underline the need to implement aggressive control of cardiovascular risk factors at younger ages, requiring a change in primary prevention strategies to include “surveillance of subclinical atherosclerosis ...
Creativity in the age of generative AI: a new era of creative partnerships
2023-11-20
Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have showcased its potential in a wide range of creative activities such as to produce works of art, compose symphonies, and even draft legal texts, slide presentations or the like. These developments have raised concerns that AI will outperform humans in creativity tasks and make knowledge workers redundant. These comments are most recently underlined by a Fortune article entitled ‘Elon Musk says AI will create a future where ‘no job is needed’: ‘The AI will be able to do everything’.
In ...
Ambegaonkar studying physical & mental workload & recovery in collegiate dancers
2023-11-20
Ambegaonkar Studying Physical & Mental Workload & Recovery In Collegiate Dancers
Jatin Ambegaonkar, Professor, School of Kinesiology, received funding for the project: "Physical and mental workload and recovery in collegiate dancers."
He and his collaborators, Kelley Wiese (PhD Student, CEHD – Kinesiology concentration) and Dr. Jena Hansen-Honeycutt (School of Dance, CVPA) aim to comprehensively assess the workload in collegiate dancers over the academic year.
Specifically, they are examining objective physical activity demands ...
Big-data study explores social factors affecting child health
2023-11-20
A team led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine has used an AI-based approach to uncover underlying patterns among the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, termed social determinants of health (SDoH), and then linked each pattern to children’s health outcomes. Compared with traditional approaches, the strategy, in principle, provides a more objective and comprehensive picture of potential social factors that affect child health, which in turn, can enable better targeted interventions.
As reported Oct. 16 in JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers analyzed data on more than 10,500 American children, in communities across 17 U.S. ...
Dere to make updates to CHIANTI atomic database & software
2023-11-20
Dere To Make Updates To CHIANTI Atomic Database & Software
Kenneth Dere, Research Professor, Physics and Astronomy, received funding from NASA for: "Updates to the CHIANTI atomic database and software."
CHIANTI is a database that contains a large quantity of atomic data for the analysis of astrophysical spectra.
Dere will also conduct maintenance on and make improvements to the ChiantiPy software package.
ChiantiPy is the Python interface to the CHIANTI atomic database for astrophysical ...
Want better AI? Get input from a real (human) expert
2023-11-20
RICHLAND, Wash.—Can AI be trusted? The question pops up wherever AI is used or discussed—which, these days, is everywhere.
It’s a question that even some AI systems ask themselves.
Many machine-learning systems create what experts call a “confidence score,” a value that reflects how confident the system is in its decisions. A low score tells the human user that there is some uncertainty about the recommendation; a high score indicates to the human user that the system, at least, is quite sure of its decisions. Savvy humans know to check the confidence score when ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Insulin resistance is linked to over 30 diseases – and to early death in women, study of people in the UK finds
Innovative semaglutide hydrogel could reduce diabetes shots to once a month
Weight loss could reduce the risk of severe infections in people with diabetes, UK research suggests
Long-term exposure to air pollution and a lack of green space increases the risk of hospitalization for respiratory conditions
Better cardiovascular health in early pregnancy may offset high genetic risk
Artificial intelligence method transforms gene mutation prediction in lung cancer: DeepGEM data releases at IASLC 2024 World Conference on Lung Cancer
Antibody–drug conjugate I-DXd shows clinically meaningful response in patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer
IASLC Global Survey on biomarker testing reveals progress and persistent barriers in lung cancer biomarker testing
Research shows pathway to developing predictive biomarkers for immune checkpoint inhibitors
Just how dangerous is Great Salt Lake dust? New research looks for clues
Maroulas appointed Associate Vice Chancellor, Director of AI Tennessee
New chickadee research finds cognitive skills impact lifespan
Cognitive behavioral therapy enhances brain circuits to relieve depression
Terasaki Institute awarded $2.3 Million grant from NIH for organ transplantation research using organs-on-a-chip technology
Atoms on the edge
Postdoc takes multipronged approach to muon detection
Mathematical proof: Five satellites needed for precise navigation
Scalable, multi-functional device lays groundwork for advanced quantum applications
Falling for financial scams? It may signal early Alzheimer’s disease
Integrating MRI and OCT for new insights into brain microstructure
Designing a normative neuroimaging library to support diagnosis of traumatic brain injury
Department of Energy announces $68 million in funding for artificial intelligence for scientific research
DOE, ORNL announce opportunity to define future of high-performance computing
Molecular simulations, supercomputing lead to energy-saving biomaterials breakthrough
Low-impact yoga and exercise found to help older women manage urinary incontinence
Genetic studies reveal new insights into cognitive impairment in schizophrenia
Researcher develops technology to provide cleaner energy and cleaner water
Expect the unexpected: nanoscale silver unveils intrinsic self-healing abilities
nTIDE September 2024 Jobs Report: Gains in employment for people with disabilities appear to level off after reducing gaps with non-disabled workers
Wiley enhances NMR Spectral Library Collection with extensive new databases
[Press-News.org] Massive 2022 eruption reduced ozone levelsThe Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano changed the chemistry, dynamics of Earth’s stratosphere