I have not heard of any reliable reports of hams getting through to Tonga… there are hams there, but the loss of infrastructure would impact them most likely. It is fairly common for hams in prosperous countries to have go-boxes set up for emergency communications but I don’t know if that would be the case in Tonga. That type of equipment is limited, too; solar powered, low output, compromise antennas. Probably capable of communicating to NZ or AUS though. There are also airports that should have HF equipment, boats, even small pleasure craft often have HF available; the scale of destruction may be the issue here. Starlink is available in AUS and NZ so maybe that would be an option for Tonga, but it requires a stable installation to work as well
And that timeline could be stretched further because of the proximity of the break to the undersea volcano, and the danger of further eruptions.
This sounds like a job for Gordon Tracey.
All the very best to the people of Tonga.
Also you need to take into account what the ocean floor is like, if there a large crevices you need to go around rather than just draping the cable over the top (though they do for smaller crevices). There are also other underwater mountains/volcanoes not on that map - don’t be fooled into thinking it is comprehensive.
The straits between Taiwan and Philippines have a lot of cables going through there and in the 2006 earthquake a lot of them were damaged. We have offices in the Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and connectivity back to US and UK.
9 of the 13 circuits we had between offices were damaged, just enough remained to keep us going.
There are more cables and diverse routing available now so a similar event wouldn’t affect us as badly next time.
The Southern Cross cable lands in Auckland. Auckland is built on a fairly large volcanic field. Tonga is the least of that cable’s problems.
That seems plausible, at least for volcanoes in those northern latitudes. The “boom” part is often a result of steam pressure that occurs when a bunch of water gets into a big hot magma chamber.
“The climate is changing at an increasingly rapid pace, and natural disasters will continue getting larger and more frequent.”
Though not volcanoes of course.
Would Starlink work if satellite phones cannot?
Still my best wished to the people of Tonga.
I hope they are okay.
Don’t know…I briefly worked for a VSAT provider in the '90s, I think that tech is similar to some of the satellite phone tech; basically, an analouge channel on a GEO satellite subdivided into 3000 voice channels. How well it works was dependent on where you are in the satellite footprint, how many channels are in use, other factors. Don’t know anything about how modern systems work, have been doing something completely different for over twenty years 
Starlink and other similar systems use LEO satellites, different frequencies… I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences in effectiveness among these systems, and I was just speculating that since Starlink is available in NZ it might be also available in Tonga, but there is about 1000Km distance between the two. Apart from coverage issues the suspended particles in the atmosphere I think are the issue, interfering with all radio services.
Yep. The sort of explosion seen last week needs very large quantities of water to come into contact with magma and be confined (briefly) to produce a detonation. Most of Iceland’s volcanoes have limited access to water - although a catastrophic explosion could be produced if another submarine eruption like that of Surtsey (1963-68) went badly astray. The early stages of Surtsey were violently explosive as water poured into the open vent with ash reaching more the 10km high and huge rocks being thrown more than a kilometre from the crater. Submarine eruptions occur a couple of times a century both off the SW tip of Reykjanes in the far SW of Iceland and in and around Vestmannaeyjar to the S of the country.
Eruptions in Iceland can get extremely ashy when melting ice mixing with magma, so any of the subglacial volcanoes - such as Eyjafjallajökull, Katla and Grímsvötn have a tendency to produce large volumes of ash; though their eruptions rarely have enough power to put large amounts into the stratosphere.
There are a few Icelandic volcanoes that regularly produce plinian eruptions which put sulfur into the stratosphere and cool the climate - all with bastard names. The best known of which are Snæfellsjökull (my absolute favourite mountain in Iceland) and the enormous Öræfajökull both of which have a history of producing enormous eruption plumes and violent explosions. Fortunately, Snæfellsjökull is in a deep sleep on a dying branch of the Icelandic volcanic system; but Öræfajökull is twitching quite regularly and may be waking up. Which might be amusing as news anchors round the world grapple with yet another nightmare pronunciation.
In the case of Iceland, the explosive central volcanoes really aren’t the biggest problem for the rest of the world - it is the fissure volcanoes we should worry about. There have been two colossal fissure eruptions since the Settlement of the 11th Century; Eldgjá which erupted in 939CE and Laki which erupted from 1783-84; the latter of which killed a quarter of all Icelanders and may have killed half a million people around the world from a combination of directly inhaling sulfur pollution and the prolonged effects it had on the climate in the Northern Hemisphere.
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