The eruption created tsunamis in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These large ocean waves killed several people and caused millions of dollars in damage in Tonga. The blast also created ripples in the atmosphere. Scientists used ground observations and satellite data to measure these atmospheric waves, which traveled around the world at least six times at nearly the speed of sound—1,240 km (770 m) per hour.
“This was a genuinely huge explosion,” says Corwin Wright, a physicist at the University of Bath in England who worked on this research. “We’ve never seen atmospheric waves going round the whole world before or at this speed.”