The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcanic barometric pressure pulse and meteotsunami travel recorded in several Antarctic stations.

Abstract

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga/Hunga-Ha'apai eruption on January 15, 2022 sent off a plume of ash material up to the stratosphere and triggered a meteotsunami and barometric pressure pulse that rippled through the atmosphere and oceans all around the world. The nature of the volcanic event and its global impacts on the oceans, atmosphere, lithosphere and the cryosphere are a matter of debate. Here we present a first overview of the time travel of the sound atmospheric pressure wave through the Antarctic continent based on in situ measurements, which represented a unique event observed through the polar ice sheet during the instrumental meteorological era. In addition, we estimated the tsunami travel time of the Hunga-Tonga event from a first order model to infer its impact over the Antarctic Sea ice and ice shelves. One outcome from our observations and modeling is the detection of the meteotsunami in the Antarctic Peninsula and the impact of the continental relief over the atmospheric pressure wave dispersion.