(ORDO NEWS) — The explosion of the Hunga Tongo volcano, which occurred in January 2022, was the most powerful ever recorded by people.
We previously said that it lifted more than 140 billion kilograms of water into the atmosphere, so its consequences are likely to make themselves felt for more than one year.
In addition, during the explosion, an entire island was destroyed, which, thanks to the same volcano, arose 8 years ago.
As a recent study showed, it was of great interest to science, as it was filled with unique, unknown life forms.
Most likely they rose to the surface from a deep dungeon. Nevertheless, in a short seven-year period of the life of the island, scientists still managed to find out how life develops on the newly formed land masses.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai: a new island in the Pacific Ocean
The new island began to rise above the surface of the Pacific Ocean in January 2015 due to volcanic activity, and began to form even earlier – in December 2014.
It received its name Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in honor of the other two islands between which it was formed.
The area of the island was almost 2 square kilometers.
According to the researchers, Tonga is the third landmass to emerge in the last century and a half, and lasted more than a year. In addition, it became the first island in this period of time to form in a tropical region.
Thanks to this, scientists were able to carefully study it. First of all, they were interested in how such islands are inhabited by life.
Do life forms unknown to science live underground?
When scientists began their research on the island, they were sure they would see the same organisms that are commonly found on dry land after the retreat of the glaciers.
Simply put, the island should have the same microorganisms that are in the sea and in bird droppings.
According to the authors of the work, it would be quite logical to populate the island with cyanobacteria, the oldest microorganisms that once filled the Earth‘s atmosphere with oxygen.
For their study, the team collected 32 soil samples from various areas that had no vegetation. All of them were taken at different heights, ranging from sea level to the top of the crater at an altitude of 120 meters.
What the researchers found in these samples surprised them greatly – the island was filled with previously unknown bacteria that feed on sulfur and hydrogen sulfide.
Moreover, of the 100 varieties of bacteria that they were able to detect by DNA sequencing, 40% were unknown. The researchers reported this in the journal mBio.
Sulfur and hydrogen sulfide are substances that are released to the surface in large quantities during a volcanic eruption.
Therefore, the researchers suggested that the bacteria they discovered live deep in the bowels of our planet, but were able to rise to the surface through underground volcanic networks in which they simply “drifted”.
This assumption indirectly confirms the fact that microbes were most similar to bacteria that exist in hydrothermal vents, that is, hot springs.
Obviously, bacteria that metabolize sulfur and hydrogen sulfide were brought to the island from the same sources.
Why was the new island destroyed
Scientists expected to continue research on the island, but volcanic activity increased to a critical value, as a result of which they had to leave this piece of land a week before the explosion.
The eruption occurred on January 15, 2022. The power of the explosion was equivalent to a hundred bombs dropped on the Japanese Hiroshima.
As a result, the island was completely destroyed, and its fragments, along with a huge amount of steam, were thrown into the upper atmosphere.
The shock wave made four revolutions around the Earth, and the sound of the explosion was heard at a distance of 10 thousand kilometers from the epicenter. Such power simply did not leave the island a chance.
But scientists hope that they will still have the opportunity to study the newly formed island. They already have a plan for future research.
“Of course, we are disappointed that the island is no more, but now we have a lot of predictions about what happens when the islands are formed,” says Nick Dragon, lead author of the study, from the University of Colorado.
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