Washington: A unique event took place in January 2022 when the activity of the famous Mount Honga Tonga volcano recorded 25,500 lightning strikes in five minutes and 400,000 times in six hours. In other words, half of the lightning events that occur around the world at that time were seen only on this mountain!
There is an underwater active volcano in the Tonga Islands chain in the South Pacific Ocean, whose full name is ‘Honga Tonga Honga Ha’pai’.
In January 2022, it spewed hot ash that set a new height record, but now a year’s worth of data has revealed that new records for lightning strikes have been set during that time, which experts are skeptical of. By this process, the nearby water was heated and turned into vapor and reached the stratosphere, the main layer of the earth. On the other hand, the shock waves from the heart-rending volcanic activity were felt far and wide.
In this way, the incidents of lightning strike have set a new record. According to Vaisala, an international organization that counts lightning incidents around the world, half of all the lightning incidents in the world were noted near this volcano. Experts have called it disastrous.
Dr. Chris Vegasi, a specialist in Vaisala, says he’s been recording lightning strikes for 40 years, but this was an unusually intense one. On January 15, 2022, the entire mountain was engulfed in semi-slash lines of lightning.
According to Vaisala, lightning strikes increased worldwide in 2022 and only in the United States there were more than 198 million lightning strikes, which was 4 million more than the previous year. It should be noted that due to the process of lightning, the surrounding air becomes extremely hot and thus the heat can increase.
Now the experts who attribute this series of power emissions in volcanic activity to climate change have divided into two groups. However, scientists from both sides believe that more research is needed in this field.
