Tonga Islands. A violent volcano erupts on the island of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, 65 km north of the archipelago’s main island, Tongatapu. It is the most violent eruption in recent decades globally. It triggers tsunamis of a few meters on several Pacific coasts. Two people drown in Peru due to the tsunami. However, the tsunami warning is issued in time. The mushroom cloud of incandescent dust, an impressive 5 km wide structure, quickly reaches the stratosphere; the explosion is heard as far as 2,000 km away, in New Zealand, where it arrives a few hours later. The explosion is captured by satellites, and the shock wave reaches the opposite side of the world the next day, where it is clearly measurable by instruments as a sudden spike of a couple of mbar.
