Yeah I saw a post somewhere earlier today mentioning volcanoes increasing global warming. Everything I’ve ever read shows it actually causes cooling. Hence the little Ice age in the middle ages after a big one blew(don’t recall the name. As well as after Krakatoa blew causing the year without a summer in the NE US and Europe. You also get large amounts of Sulfur Dioxide which blocks sunlight at higher altitudes.
Water vapor vs particulates that reflect heat. Most studies said the water vaper was responsible for warming from last one but that study said different. Which means warming will accelerate as the cooling impacts of the volcano fade
My crude understanding is that water vapor content is primarily driven by temperature. The higher the temperature the more water vapor. The water vapor magnified the warming impact of the source, such as CO2. Given that if volcanic activity particulates causes cooling as per my understanding I’m not sure how that would increase water vapor. When the particulates leave the atmosphere then it gets warmer, at which point water vapor would increase, which would cause more warming.
There may be another underwater volcanic eruption any day now a few hundred miles off the coast of Oregon. MSN
but how long will that extra water vapor stay up there? It’s my understanding that water vapor tends to cycle in and out of atmosphere in a matter of days, not years.
no idea, im a civil engineer. we take care of it after it falls... but from what i've read I believe it is worked out already okay..curiosity..from June 24 Hunga Tonga: Record amount of water from 2022 Tonga eruption is still in atmosphere | New Scientist Most of the nearly 150 million tonnes of water vapour launched into the air by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in 2022 remains there, setting record concentrations in many parts of the atmosphere. “It’s really a very special, unprecedented event,” says Christian von Savigny at the University of Greifswald in Germany. Tonga Eruption Blasted Unprecedented Amount of Water Into Stratosphere - NASA When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere.
The U.S. Geological Survey, a government agency tasked with monitoring for volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, is being gutted by Donald Trump amid news that cities like Seattle and Portland could be completely destroyed by a mega-tsunami if the Cascadia subduction zone lets loose a 9.0 earthquake, as it's expected to do sometime in the next 200 years. Good thinking, Trump! You really saved some money on that one! https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/climate/volcanoes-earthquakes-tsunamis-federal-cuts-dg
FYI, Portland would be fine due to the distance it sits inland and geographically located behind coastal mountains. The actual tremors could be a different story. I’ve heard that everything west of I-5 could be toast. Seattle would similarly be fine from a tsunami from the Cascadia subduction zone, but there is a separate Seattle fault that could cause a tsunami in the Puget Sound.
