NASA Scientists Estimate Tonga Blast At 10 Megatons (npr.org) 82
According to NASA researchers, the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga was equivalent to around 10 megatons of TNT. "That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II," reports NPR. From the report: The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "This might be the loudest eruption since [the eruption of the Indonesian volcano] Krakatau in 1883," Poland says. That massive 19th-century eruption killed thousands and released so much ash that it cast much of the region into darkness.
But for all its explosive force, the eruption itself was actually relatively small, according to Poland, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Unlike the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which spewed ash and smoke for hours, the events at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai lasted less than 60 minutes. He does not expect that the eruption will cause any short-term changes to Earth's climate, the way other large eruptions have in the past. In fact, Poland says, the real mystery is how such a relatively small eruption could create such a big bang and tsunami.
But for all its explosive force, the eruption itself was actually relatively small, according to Poland, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Unlike the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which spewed ash and smoke for hours, the events at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai lasted less than 60 minutes. He does not expect that the eruption will cause any short-term changes to Earth's climate, the way other large eruptions have in the past. In fact, Poland says, the real mystery is how such a relatively small eruption could create such a big bang and tsunami.
Re:stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:5, Funny)
Re:stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:4, Informative)
Re:stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:5, Funny)
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There's a guy who can burp at 122dB - loud enough to be heard in a Motorhead concert.
https://www.guinnessworldrecor... [guinnessworldrecords.com]
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the equivalent of dropping 1 Library of Congress from an altitude of 43 km.
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How about 1/6th of the Tsar Bomba?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I hear you, though. People should move on from 1945.
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Re:stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't understand the magnitude of "equivalent to around 10 megatons of TNT." One of the only large blasts that they understand is the atomic bomb that was used at Hiroshima. Saying the volcano's eruption was "more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II," gives them something to compare it to. Another way to say it is 40.184 petajoules and again that number is meaningless to most people.
The eruption of Mt St. Helens was measured at 24 megatons. Once again, not many people can relate to that amount of energy. Saying the eruption at Mt St Helens was over 1000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan gives it scale. Saying the Tonga eruption was about 40% of the force at Mt St Helens might be helpful to some, but that is just a percentage of another hard-to-imagine force.
Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:2)
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> if one bomb instead of two might have done the trick
What you're not allowed to learn in gov't school is that the Japanese Ambassador had already made overtures to the Russian ambassador to negotiate a surrender with the Allies, but the Japanese were insisting on leaving a figurehead emperor in place to direct the people. Truman refused, and wanted to use his new "toy" to force an unconditional surrender (which he got). MacArthur, as military governor, subsequently appointed the Emperor to direct the pe
Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:4, Interesting)
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> if one bomb instead of two might have done the trick
What you're not allowed to learn in gov't school is that the Japanese Ambassador had already made overtures to the Russian ambassador to negotiate a surrender with the Allies, but the Japanese were insisting on leaving a figurehead emperor in place to direct the people. Truman refused, and wanted to use his new "toy" to force an unconditional surrender (which he got). MacArthur, as military governor, subsequently appointed the Emperor to direct the people as that's what Japanese culture needed.
Wrong.
They dont' teach that in any schools anywhere in the world because it's not true.
Remember that we now have the telegrams sent between Sato and Togo.
The Japanese ambassador was instructed to approach Russia to intercede with the other Allies to negotiate a "cessation of hostilities" in which Japan would keep most of their territorial gains and government. The Russians knew this and refused to negotiate. Togo was specifically instructed to not discuss surrender.
The figurehead Emperor was in no way a con
Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:4)
Um no. The Japanese where trying to negotiate through the USSR and end the war. That is the only thing you got right.
What you conveniently left out was now that the USSR was no longer fighting a war in Europe turned its eye toward former Japanese territories. Stalin didn't want the Japanese surrendering to the US before he got his sliced of the pie, so he basically stone walled any communication between Japan and the US. This allowed him time to declare war on Japan.
Truman never got any messages from Japan. The only other option to ending the war would have been a invasion of Japan. Since Japan was basically a armed camp at this this time the casualties estimated on the allied side was at 1 million plus. The civilian casualties where estimated to be 10 times that many.
Once all the options where weighted the use atomic weapons to end the war was best possible outcome. It was the lesser evil on the table.
Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:5, Informative)
The Allied Powers had agreed that all the Axis Powers must surrender unconditionally. When the Flensburg Government in Germany under Admiral Donitz tried to negotiate a surrender, the Allies refused to accept it, and demanded an unconditional surrender.
When the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the Japanese government, like the Flensburg government a few months earlier, tried to push for a negotiated surrender (mainly to try to preserve and shield the Emperor, and probably other high officials). As with Donitz's overtures, this was rejected, and when the Japanese did not offer an unconditional surrender, the second bomb was dropped. Even after Nagasaki, some Japanese officers wanted to go down fighting, and attempted to kidnap Emperor Hirohito to prevent him from ordering the unconditional surrender, just to show you the mindset of many Japanese officers of the time.
Japan was held to the same standard that Germany had been held to; no conditions, no negotiations, surrender the government and all military forces completely. The chief difference was that by the time Donitz was hanging out in Flensburg with his cabinet make-believing he could somehow convince the Americans and the British that Germany would help them beat the Soviets, Germany's command structure had completely collapsed, most of its armies already either stripped of their weapons, or rendered pretty much impotent by overwhelming Allied military superiority. Japan still retained a relatively intact government and its military command structure remained largely intact, at least in Japan itself, and the only way to get Japan to the state of capitulation that Germany was five months earlier would have been to invade the main islands, an operation that would have lead to massive Allied casualties and might have dragged the war on for months.
There's also been the suggestion that there was general fears that Japan could end up like Germany, with the Soviets creating an occupied zone from the north, just as they had done in East Germany. So it's possible the US decided it didn't want a protracted ground war that, apart from the massive casualties, would inevitably lead to Soviet invasion of Hokkaido (Roosevelt and Churchill had pushed for Stalin to declare war at the Yalta Conference, though mainly to kick the Japanese out of Manchuria). Using the second bomb forced the Japanese government to surrender pretty much immediately, sending the message that it was out of options, and also ending any need for a possible Soviet invasion of Hokkaido, which could have meant an iron curtain not only across Eastern Europe, but also Japan..
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The eruption of Mt St. Helens was measured at 24 megatons. Once again, not many people can relate to that amount of energy.
Forget the amount of energy, most people don't know Mt St. Helens was a volcano which erupted. They don't teach that kind of stuff in history around the world. And now ever after googling it I have no idea of the devastation it caused so even when looking it up it provides no means of comparison. All I get is pictures of clouds and ash in a national park and I'm none the wiser as to how powerful of an explosion it was.
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Here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/... [pinterest.com]
That is how much of Mount St Helens the 1980 eruption instantly turned into dust and ejected from the area.
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Doesn't help much. I see a bit of a mountain missing. I see trees, are they covered in ash? Did they fall over? There's no sense of devastation there at least none which a human can grasp. A person doesn't know how much energy it takes to move soil. A person does however have a general sense how for much energy it takes to knock over a tree making the Tunguska event a better frame of reference given the historic images of that.
A person also has a general sense of how sturdy the building they are in is and a
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https://twitter.com/waDNR/stat... [twitter.com]
It didn't turn all of that immediately into dust and eject it. Most of it just slid off to the side.
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Forget the amount of energy, most people don't know Mt St. Helens was a volcano which erupted.
Is the CRT stuff that much more important in today's schools? Do they still teach WW II?
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Interesting to know, but my point was more it wasn't general knowledge and didn't really show up in a google search.
It is about the frame of reference we know and see. For you I take it Mt St Helena has meaning seeing how you've seen it first hand. For most of us, sadly we don't.
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Why not compare it to more recent events that people alive today may be more familiar with? The Texas fertiliser plant explosion in 2013 was about 10 tons, so it's about 1,000,000x that. The Beirut explosion about about 1kt, so it was 1000x that.
As someone who has actually been to Hiroshima, I do find such comparisons quite distasteful. They remind me of some unpleasant memories. Things I don't regret knowing and witnessing, but unpleasant anyway.
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I think that the unpleasantness is precisely why Hiroshima scaled comparisons are entirely apt and should be continued to use. We need to not forget the incredible destruction that our nuclear weapons can create.
Atomic weapons are far more powerful than anyone of the younger generation can imagine -- volcanoes erupt with the force of Mother Nature behind them, an entire planet to create what amounts to a pimple on the surface. A nuclear device about the size of a car, in comparison, is able to erase a cit
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Why not compare it to more recent events that people alive today may be more familiar with? The Texas fertiliser plant explosion in 2013 was about 10 tons, so it's about 1,000,000x that.
Comparisons over that many orders of magnitude are kind of pointless. Would you explain to people how heavy a horse is by measuring its weight in ants? Or would you compare its weight to, say, humans instead?
As someone who has actually been to Hiroshima, I do find such comparisons quite distasteful.
Completely irrelevant for suitability of comparisons.
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One of the only large blasts that they understand is the atomic bomb that was used at Hiroshima.
No, they absolutely don't. It's just become such a lazy stand-in for journalists to use as comparison that it's assumed people understand the scale. Essentially nobody reading this article today saw the Hiroshima explosion or saw the immediate after-effects. I'd wager that few could even explain how it compared to 500lb conventional bombs (hint: not 500 pounds of TNT [wikipedia.org]).
Ignoring the questionable taste in using Hiroshima as a relative scale for explosive force, it's not something people understand - they're
What does beyond disgusting look like -- exactly? (Score:2)
I find it beyond disgusting that we are still using the deaths of 10s of 1000s of people as a unit of measure
"Beyond" obviously doesn't mean content to understand not all things are for all people and move on? beyond?
Re:stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that better than "how many dead Japanese was it ?"
It should be pointed out that they did not actually do that. That was you.
Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:2)
Along these lines, I can't speak for everyone but when someone makes a comparison to Hiroshima I'm not thinking in terms of deaths. I think in terms of level of physical destruction, which is well documented via photos of flattened cities that many people have seen in school and news. Death counts are so dependent upon location of explosion and type of explosive.
Relating one explosion to another seems totally rational to me. It's not a celebration of deadly explosions, just a practical comparison. Even when
Oh dear, someones disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case snowflake, perhaps we should never compare the speed of anything to that of a bullet. Bullets have killed 10s, maybe even 100s of millions over the centuries after all.
Also perhaps we should never compare any genocides to that of the holocaust either?
In fact any comparisons involving nasty things people such as yourself emotionaly can't cope with should be banned, right?
Newsflash - hiroshima happened, its an historical event. We all know its significance and we don't need to be preached at about it by halo polishers like you.
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Also perhaps we should never compare any genocides to that of the holocaust either?
We're talking about not comparing something which isn't about people killing people to something which is. It's complaining about comparing apples to oranges, not apples to apples.
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If you rule out comparisons to anything that has killed people then you'll be left with a pretty short list.
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Except the tsunami did kill people. The tsunami caused be the force of the explosion.
https://www.dw.com/en/deaths-c... [dw.com]
Re: Oh dear, someones disgusted (Score:2)
Sorry, I meant intentionally. Also sorry you are so bad at discerning intent and reading from context. Must make life confusing.
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Did we get up on the wrong side of bed today, sunshine? ;-)
That means the explosive force was more than 500 times...
But I agree, wtf is "explosive force" in terms of a detonation yield? And how is it quantified so that it may be compared? Bah...get off my lawn.
To be fair they did quantify the event in terms of TNT....
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Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:5, Interesting)
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I disagree. It's a good way to never forget.
Yeah, I find it quite chilling to think we are able to make explosions that rival the largest volcanos we have observed. Scott Manley's channels showed some videos of the Tonga eruption captured by geo-stationary weather satellite, and it's pretty shocking the scale compared to the size of the earth. You can even see the shockwave propagating over the pacific ocean. When you consider that the Tsar Bomba was around 4x as big, that is freaking disturbing.
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Tsar Bomba wasn't 4x as big. Tsar Bomba was a fraction in "size" to what was visible from space. Tsar Bomba's mushroom cloud was only around ~60m at maximum diameter.
Tsar Bomba was 4x as energetic.
Volcanoes look far worse than they are. It's mostly an ass-ton of kinetic energy that's largely useless at damaging things.
That shockwave you saw from Tonga, as terrifying as it looks, was a fart next to the shock
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I guess the lives of the 57 people who died from the Mount St. Helens means nothing to you? I am offended. Sickened. I feel oppressed and you've made me go to my safe place.
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lol
Re:stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:4, Funny)
I guess the lives of the 57 people who died from the Mount St. Helens means nothing to you? I am offended. Sickened. I feel oppressed and you've made me go to my safe place.
My safe space was Tonga you insensitive clod.
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It had the energy and full force of 10 million Taco Bell Cheesy Bean Burrito induced farts. That better?
Re: stop making Hiroshima a unit of measure (Score:3)
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Well we need to ensure they aren't forgotten and this is a good way of remembering what was done to them. I don't see the problem, nobody is being hurt except YOUR feelings, which I am sure you can suck up and get over. Worry about some of the world's actual problems today that you're neglecting.
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I find it beyond disgusting that we are still using the deaths of 10s of 1000s of people as a unit of measure, especially considering it is a _natural_ disaster and not a man-made disaster as Hiroshima was.
Why is it disgusting to compare something devastating to something else devastating, and a unit of measure that people know well from their history lessons?
It's a fucking volcano so maybe we could compare it to aonther volcano
Compare it to what volcano? I've not seen the wide spread devastation caused by another volcanic explosion. Do you know how big the explosion at Pompeii was? If you don't then you just proposed a completely fucking useless comparison. Why did I mention Pompeii? Because I don't know Mt St Helens, further embedding that your comparison is pointless as ther
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Isn't that better than "how many dead Japanese was it ?"
I may be nitpicking, but the number of dead Japanese is not a good way to quantify the size of a nuclear explosion.
Nagasaki was a much bigger blast than Hiroshima, yet it killed far fewer people. The reason is that there are no forests near Nagasaki, so the buildings were built of stone and mortar rather than wood. The stone walls provided better protection from radiation, and they didn't burn like the wooden buildings at Hiroshima, so there was no firestorm.
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There is actually a 'Norris' standard of force, 10MT=889640141 Norris.
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It's sad that this comment has been hammered down to -1 Troll. It's not, it's a fair argument on something that cats-paw clearly feels strongly about. It's not trying to deliberately upset anyone. It's a bit angry in tone, but it's an emotive issue and doesn't cross the line IMHO. It generated some interesting debate, with several responses making the opposing case.
Slashdot used to be a place where you could come for a variety of interesting views and opinions. Sometimes it still is, but all too often peopl
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It's sad that this comment has been hammered down to -1 Troll.
I tend to agree, but for different reasons. I think the OP's post is a conspicuous example of the extremes where the modern offense culture is leading. It shows (again) the issues with some branches of progressive thinking, and the way how proponents search for real or imaginary offenses to feed their unlimited hunger for censorship.
The comment should be visible as a bad example, and pointed at as a lesson on how pernicious this kind of thinking is.
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I find it beyond disgusting that we are still using the deaths of 10s of 1000s of people as a unit of measure, especially considering it is a _natural_ disaster and not a man-made disaster as Hiroshima was.
It's a fucking volcano so maybe we could compare it to aonther volcano as a unit of measure, for example how many Mt St Helens was it ?
Isn't that better than "how many dead Japanese was it ?"
I bet this comment attracts some god-awful trolls...
Oh, fuck off.
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Liberal cunts like you make me ashamed to be a liberal.
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Glad to see someone mentioned this line of thinking.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events, but the (all-too-literal) Rape of Nanjing was at least comparable, and arguably worse. And that doesn't include all the other horrors of the war.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't condemn that particular use of nuclear weapons, but we should at least be very slow to do so, given that the choice at the time was between terrible alternatives: a trolley problem on an enormous scale, with enormous uncertainty of how
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Nobody is comparing the casualty counts of Hiroshima and Tonga. It's a measure of blast effects.
To date, only three people have been found dead in Tonga (I'm sure this number will probably rise). So in this case, it would be more appropriate to compare Tonga's casualty count to that of an Antifa riot.
Okay, how many Nagasakis was that? (Score:2)
Worthwhile coverage of the eruption (Score:5, Informative)
Scott Manley outdid the media by showing footage from several satellites [youtube.com] on Sunday.
Re: Worthwhile coverage of the eruption (Score:2)
It's really interesting to see the day/night terminator "race" the shock wave from the explosion.
Conspiracy theory (Score:1)
Would it not be convenient to test a nuke on top of a vulcano? It's gotten very hard to actually do underwater explosions.
Re:Conspiracy theory (Score:4, Informative)
A nuke has a distinctive seismic signature. The fallout would rain down on Tonga along with the ash, which gives another unmissable piece of evidence.
So no, you can't hide a nuclear test by placing the bomb on a volcano.
Chimney crickets (Score:2)
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About 8.5 seconds worth. Good job, fuckwit.
Pimples (Score:2)
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A pimple pops when external pressure is applied. A volcano explodes when the internal pressure *drops* and gases dissolved in the molten rock come out of solution, like when a carbonated drink is opened.