The impacts and legacy of the 2022 eruption of Hunga Volcano, Kingdom of Tonga

The climax of the 2021-2022 eruption of Hunga Volcano (also called Hunga Tonga – Hunga Ha’apai) on the 15^th January 2022 was the most explosive volcanic eruption this century. The eruption generated pressure waves that travelled around the planet multiple times, ash clouds that reached the mesosphere, tsunamis with run-ups over 10 m and severed the subsea telecommunication cables that connected the Kingdom of Tonga to the rest of the world.

Hunga Volcano, 70 km offshore from Tongatapu, is an almost entirely submerged caldera volcano. The 2023 eruption was the most explosive in recent history, and resulted in substantial modification to the seafloor. By comparing bathymetric datasets from before the eruption with datasets acquired by this team and autonomous vehicles in the months immediately after the event, we are able to identify the impacts of the eruption on the seafloor and the processes that caused the damage to the cables and, by combining this with auxiliary datasets, provide new constraints on the speed and dynamics of volcanic triggered submarine flows.

The eruption deepened the caldera floor by 800 m, with a loss of > 6 km³ of material, while high energy submarine density flows, focussed into gullies, caused upwards of 90 m of erosion higher up the flanks and deposited large lobes of material at the bases of them. These flows travelled hundreds of kilometres from the volcano at some of the fastest speeds ever measured for submarine density flows and were responsible for the damage to the subsea cables.