"For a while, Sam Vea had been smelling sulphur on the air only mildly infernal, like a distant sniff of hell, but sulphur nonetheless. Still, on the Saturday evening when the explosion happened, he sat up in fright. It sounded so near he thought some cataclysm had occurred right there, in his neighbourhood. The windows trembled. The curtains fell off. Vea peeked out of his house but saw nothing destroyed or on fire."
"The volcano, with the grand, rolling name of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai, lies 40 miles north of Tongatapu mostly under the Pacific Ocean but with two spits of land showing above the water, like the ears of a drowned cat. Since its several brief eruptions the previous month, December 2021, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai had continued to gurgle and churn. On that Saturday, 15 January, 2.4 cubic miles of sediment and molten rock shot through its mouth with the force of what scientists call a magma hammer,"
Sam Vea smelled sulphur before a sudden explosion on a Saturday evening that woke him and shook windows and knocked curtains down. He looked outside, saw no fires, then assumed the volcano had erupted and drove to collect his daughters as roads filled with cars fleeing the sea and tiny pebbles fell from the sky. Drivers wiped ash from windshields and waited in traffic while skies darkened. The submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai, north of Tongatapu, had been active in December 2021. On 15 January about 2.4 cubic miles of sediment and molten rock erupted, sending a massive plume into the atmosphere.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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