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Missing atmospheric sulfur in the 15 January 2022 Hunga eruption and implications for completeness of paleoclimate-volcanic records

Jie Wu 1,2, Shane Cronin1, Marco Brenna2, Sung-Hyun Park3, Alessio Pontesilli4, Ingrid Ukstins1, David Adams1, Joali Paredes-Mariño1, Kyle Hamilton1, Mila Huebsch1, Diego González-García5,6, Chris Firth7, James White2, Alexander Nichols8, Terry Plank9, Jitraporn Vongsvivut10, Annaleise Klein10, Frank Ramos11, Folauhola Latu'ila12, Taaniela Kula12

  • Affiliations:  1School of Environment, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; 2Department of Geology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; 3Korean Polar Research Institute, Incheon, Republic of South Korea; 4Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, Italy; 5Institute of Earth System Sciences (Section of Mineralogy), Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hanover, Germany; 6Department of Mineralogy and Petrology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; 7School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; 8School of Earth and Environment, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand; 9Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, USA; 10Australian Synchrotron, ANSTO, Clayton, Australia; 11Department of Geological Sciences, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA; 12Tonga Geological Services, Nuku'alofa, Kingdom of Tonga 

  • Presentation type: Talk

  • Presentation time: Thursday 11:15 - 11:30, Room S150

  • Programme No: 1.1.10

  • Theme 1 > Session 1

Abstract

The explosive January 2022 Hunga eruption in Tonga injected unprecedented volumes of water into the upper atmosphere and generated widespread climatic impacts. However, it ejected anomalously little sulfur. We explain the missing sulfur with volatile budgets calculated from a unique set of timed volcanic ash samples through the eruption. We show that magma was stored in a weakly stratified reservoir at 2.1 to >5.6 km-depth. Magma rose from its initial sites in <2 minutes then fragmented and quenched at 400--1000 m below sea-level. Ash grains preserve micro-scale chemical mingling and show contrasts in content of fast-diffusing magmatic water. The 11-hr eruption released a total of 319 Tg of magmatic water, which is <10% of the amount convected into the plume by magmatic-volatilization of sea-water. Of the total 9.4 Tg sulfur output we show that >93% of it directly entered sea-water during eruption and fragmentation. Our results raise the concern that satellite SO2 monitoring may underestimate the magma output of eruptions driven by submarine explosivity. The low mass of sulfur erupted to the atmosphere likely renders submarine explosive eruptions nearly invisible in ice-core records, even though Hunga has had an obvious climate influence, which resulted from dispersion of other volcanic compounds. Volcano-climate risk may be higher than current estimates.