Three years after the Tonga submarine volcanic eruption scientists are still sifting through data. It seems the volcano behaved in the opposite way to what was expected – water vapour warming up the top of the atmosphere. See https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/05/hunga-tonga-eruption-stratosphere-water-vapor-record/ … A new scientific report says the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ta’apai eruption, instead, cooled the stratosphere. It did not heat it up. Water vapour is of course the principle greenhouse gas, so finding out what was going on has repercussions in the political world. Though we may expect the largely scientifically illiterate political class will carry on and it won’t reach their radar. We are told it left no measurable fingerprint on global temperature during 2023 and 2024. It did however, warm ocean water around the globe – picked up by climate scientists as an oddity they attributed to global warming. That is because of the submarine nature of the volcano and the shock wave that ran through the worlds oceans generated by the energy released. It is said to have delivered a huge volume of water vapour into the stratosphere – ten per cent of all the moisture already sitting at that atmospheric level.
The caldera itself sits 490 feet below the ocean surface – deep enough for magma to super heat vast volumes of sea water. The force of the blast sent atmospheric pressure waves looping around the planet over a 6 day period. Even today, in 2026, atmospheric water vapour levels remain abnormally high. Short term ozone loss was also detected above the Pacific although no evidence of polar ozone depletion was noticed. Hence, the ozone redistribution was assigned to air circulation disrupted by the eruption.