Excerpt
Significant damage reported on Tonga's main island after volcanic eruption, tsunami
The eruption triggered atmospheric shockwaves and unusually large waves that traveled as far as Alaska, Japan and South America.
Professor Bettina Scheu, a volcanologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich told DW that while such eruptions are common in the area, ones of this magnitude were very infrequent.
"We know from the records that every thousand years the volcano is capable of producing such an eruption," Scheu said, adding that the intensity of the explosion "came from the very efficient mixing of the hot magma with the cold water."
"So that region is a very active one, it's the Tonga-Kermadec arc, where the Pacific Plate is subducting beneath the Indo-Pacific one. There is about every 100 kilometers on the sea floor a massive volcano," the volcanologist pointed out. "It's part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, so we can expect this, however, just rarely with this level of extreme violence," Scheu said.
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