[phas-faculty_staff_others] [phas-dept] Hunga Tonga

[Carlos Bertulani]

Here you can see the pressure wave of the Hunga Tonga Volcano passing over Dallas around 7:16am CST on 15 Jan from a local weather station. The explosion was at 4:14:45 UTC and passed over Dallas at 13:16 UTC. The great circle distance between the explosion and Dallas is about 10240km, meaning that the wave traveled at 1130 km/h. The speed of sound at 1atm is 1235 km/h, so the wave was traveling just subsonic at mach 0.91 assuming a (20deg,1atm) speed of sound.

It is thrilling to see the effects of such an event very far away. It gives us the sense of Earth as a finite sized object, with events that can affect it globally, much like solar CMEs and local neutron star spin down quakes.

[cid:CD3CC521-AF89-4AF9-9D04-B8685B638033]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.tamuc.edu/pipermail/phas-faculty_staff_others/attachments/20220118/d5d6a528/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 2022-01-15_21-06-29.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 93335 bytes
Desc: 2022-01-15_21-06-29.jpg
URL: <http://mailman.tamuc.edu/pipermail/phas-faculty_staff_others/attachments/20220118/d5d6a528/attachment-0001.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
phas-dept mailing list
phas-dept at tamuc.edu
http://mailman.tamuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/phas-dept