Tonga volcano spewed ash a whopping 35 miles into the air, setting a new record

In January, an undersea volcano violently exploded near Tonga, burying the island nation in ash and stranding residents.

But it wasn’t until the ash cleared that scientists grasped just how powerful the blast was.

One team recently confirmed that the volcano, called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, shot debris higher into the atmosphere than any other eruption on record.

Writing this week in the journal Science, the researchers describe their calculations on the volcano’s plume using satellite data from multiple points of view.

Instead, researchers have to meticulously compare the plume’s height from multiple positions, and use those differences to reconstruct how high the ash cloud soared.

Previously, the record for the tallest ash plume was set during the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.

It shot debris over 40 km (24.9 mi) into the air, reaching the high stratosphere.

The absence of such data surrounding historical blasts could explain why we haven’t seen a plume reach this high before.

Or it could have been that the Hunga Tonga eruption was abnormally powerful — a scenario that spurs its own questions.