On January 15, 2022, the volcanic island of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai literally exploded, generating an eruption column more than 18 km high and a tsunami that quickly struck Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga. An excellent video about the event is available on the Geopop YouTube channel.
Only a few days later, the first humanitarian aid flights were able to reach the kingdom because volcanic ash deposits had completely shut down the runway of its only airport.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai is a fairly recent island because it formed in 2016 when Hunga Tonga, an islet of about 37 ha, joined Hunga Ha'apai, an islet of about 43 ha. The strip of land linking the two islets was created by the 2016 eruption. From 2016 until the latest eruption, the island covered about 300 ha. As a point of comparison, 1 ha is roughly the size of a regulation soccer field.
The island was completely destroyed, as you can see in this comparison map generated using Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery. But in the same hemisphere, off the Japanese coast, the volcanic island of Iwo Jima is raising concerns about a similar eruption. At the moment the ground is rising enough to bring to the surface ships sunk during the Second World War!
