NASA scientists are studying the explosion of submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai to understand how features formed on the surfaces of Mars and Venus, Nature reported.
The unusual explosion — which has been calculated at more than 500 times the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 — is offering researchers a rare chance to study how water and lava interact.
Studying the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and its evolution in recent weeks is “important for planetary science”, Petr Broz, a planetary volcanologist at the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, was quoted as saying.
