And you heard the sound of a volcanic thunder?

Geophysics first recorded volcanic rumble of thunder, watching the series of violent eruptions on the island in the North Pacific ocean last year.

The thunder was accompanied by lightning in the jets of ash which rose from the volcano Theologian in the Aleutian Islands. Rumble has registered the microphones on the other island at a distance of 64 km.

The volcanic sound of thunder never recorded because it is very difficult to separate it from explosions and rumbles that accompany volcanic eruptions. In audio, the sounds of thunder are heard as claps and clicks against the low rumble of the eruption.

"The people who were present during the eruption, just seen and heard this before, but the first time we accurately recorded and identified the sound," says Matt Haney, a seismologist from the Volcanic Observatory Alaska in anchorage (United States).

The volcano Theologian exploded more than 60 times from December 2016 to August 2017, giving researchers an ideal opportunity to record the explosions on the neighboring island Umnak. In March and June, the microphones recorded clear sounds of a volcanic thunder that arrived on Umnak three minutes later after a global network of sensors recorded the lightning flashes in the ash stream of the divine.

"If people watched the eruption in person, they would have heard the thunder," says Haney. The thunder follows the lightning that is created in the jet, when tiny particles of ash and ice collide and become electrically charged in the process.

The volcano Theologian lies directly under the main routes from Asia to North America. In the past year due to eruptions declared an aviation alert when jets of ash rose high into the sky. Further study of volcanic thunder will help you to find more accurate ways to predict the size of volcanic jets and, thus, to know how devastating they can be to fly.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»