Vittorio Veneto, meteorologist and physicist measures the explosion of the Hunga volcano from the Cansiglio plateau

VITTORIO VENETO. Did you know that from the Cansiglio plateau you can observe all the greatest upheavals of the earth? Yes, even the explosion of the volcano Hunga, in Tonga. In fact, it was detected by the instrumentation developed by the scholar Andrea Costantini, physicist and meteorologist from Vittorio Veneto, and by the numerous group of friends who support it, through 7 stations equipped with a pressure sensor adequately sensitive to variations of the order of 1 -2hPa.

Stations scattered throughout the plateau, two of which are super-equipped to measure what happens in the bowels of the earth or the seas, as in this case. «The protagonists of this measure are the barometers, that is the sensors that detect the atmospheric pressure present in a specific place and that are present both at the Casera Le Rotte station and at Malga Filippon – explains Costantini -. At o4 UTC (or 5 Italian time, equal to 17 hours in the time of the Tonga Islands, in the Pacific), the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (located in the north-east of New Zealand) suddenly went into activity , generating a very powerful explosion which, once it emerged from the sea surface, projected huge quantities of volcanic material into the atmosphere (up to the stratosphere, at altitudes of about 40km) and produced a pressure wave linked to the paroxysmal outflow of hot gases. This wave, traveling at a speed close to that of sound (about 1000km / h), began to travel the earth’s surface in every direction and reached us after about 16 hours and a journey of almost 18,000km ».

But how was it possible to measure his passage in Cansiglio? “Thanks to the stations: observing the trend of the barometers around 9 pm on January 15 – says Costantini -, we observed a similar deviation repeated in both stations which in a few minutes show an increase of about 1hPa and then abruptly decrease by almost 2 hPa, with successive oscillations although less marked than the first (the result of other waves arriving from different directions compared to the first which is estimated to have come from the north) until it returns to the trend that previously characterized the pressure (stationary or slightly steadily increasing compared to the previous hours) “.

«The pressure wave was detected in practically all the stations in the world (obviously at different times, depending on the distance from the place of the volcanic explosion). Let’s think, therefore – continues Costantini – what energy was emitted by that distant volcano to reach us …) and the very close interconnection between natural elements, apparently “unrelated” to each other (as volcanoes and atmospheric pressure might seem) , to remind us that we live in a splendid planet and that it must be protected with all our strength ».