You know, when I started the Sky Candy column, I worried if I'd have enough material every week. I quickly realized it wasn't a worry. I restarted the Sunday Supplement and had the same worry. I shouldn't worry so much. Here's a pleasant futuristic sound track:
So let's start things off with a bang.
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— Mor Edge Insight (@MorEdge_Insight) August 21, 2026
January 15, 2022.
Somewhere in the South Pacific, an underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga woke up in the most violent way imaginable.
This is what it looked like from space. The plume shot so high it punched straight into the mesosphere ,higher than any volcanic… pic.twitter.com/E8e5pdFxsj
There's a whole series of pictures in this thread. Even when the volcano is above ground, a volcanic eruption puts a lot of water, CO2, and other things into the air. Start underwater and you get even more, including a lot of very surprised fish.
Just for scale, let's look at Mount St Helens in 1980. We had ash falls for days as far away as Pueblo, Colo.
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— Mor Edge Insight (@MorEdge_Insight) August 21, 2026
For scale, the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption (video below) released about as much energy as a large hydrogen bomb. Hunga Tonga was in the same league, and in some ways bigger.
Estimates of the power of the explosion range between 30-60+ megatons. The largest nuclear… pic.twitter.com/UzDcfy5OG4
It was dramatic on the ground too, of course.
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— Mor Edge Insight (@MorEdge_Insight) August 21, 2026
While satellites watched the eruption from orbit, this is what it looked like on the ground in Tonga.
The underwater blast triggered a tsunami that rushed inland within minutes. Waves poured over beaches, flooded roads, and pushed through neighborhoods. People scrambled for… pic.twitter.com/6KnjijvQaa
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— Mor Edge Insight (@MorEdge_Insight) August 21, 2026
The eruption didn’t just push ash into the upper atmosphere.
It also created the most intense lightning storm ever recorded, with thousands of flashes per minute lighting up the plume. Over 200,000 lightning strikes in total. Some of those bolts struck higher than any… pic.twitter.com/HAcvUe44mV
Here's a video showing just how big a badda-boom it was.
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— Mor Edge Insight (@MorEdge_Insight) August 21, 2026
What you can’t fully see in the video is the invisible part.
The blast created a pressure wave so powerful it raced around the entire planet at the speed of sound. Satellites watched it expand outward in perfect circles.
The wave kept going, looping the Earth multiple… pic.twitter.com/uG8ggmOOl7
As long-time readers already know, I'm an astronomy nerd, a science nerd, and a space nerd. Also a science fiction nerd, a Robert Heinlein nerd, and an Elon Musk nerd. And more, but this list is already getting embarrassing.
One recent event is that the most recent Starship launch landed softly in the Indian Ocean. A number of people on X thought it would sink promptly, because something that can handle super-cooled liquid oxygen and liquid methane wouldn't be airtight.
Fooled them. Here it is, after finally being towed back to land.
After approx. 24 days at sea, the SpaceX Recovery team successfully guided Starship to a location just off the coast of Christmas Island. A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to… pic.twitter.com/h6YYWb0LT5
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 18, 2026
I am planning a lengthy piece on where Musk and Musk's companies are heading (in short, Musk is building the future Heinlein imagined). One of them that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves is The Boring Company.
Right now, only a small percentage of the Vegas loop is open and we already do about 40,000 passengers a day on a busy convention day, which is more than the majority of light rail systems in the US.
— Mike Baier (@Mike__Baier) July 27, 2026
In a few months we will open the airport connector tunnels, which are two of… pic.twitter.com/BAFaY80hrm
In other news, I've been following the climate debate since Climategate — and before, including marching on the original Earth Day while I was in high school. Unfortunately, climate science has gotten exceedingly politicized, as I'm sure PJ readers already know.
Related:
- Global WarmingGate
- Five Ways to Know if You Can Talk to Someone about Climate
- IPCC AR5 Global Warming Report Leaked
- and lots more.
The great thing about science is it does self-correct — eventually. The RCP 8.5 report was one that was used for all sorts of government policies. It was mostly bunk.
NOAA proposes to amend the most recent US National Climate Assessment in light of the retirement of RCP8.5 et al. as implausible https://t.co/M7Rz2VCHCS pic.twitter.com/7dPGRXXciZ
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) August 20, 2026
Roger Pielke Jr. and his dad, Roger Pielke Sr. (duh), both have struggled in the climate trenches for close to 20 years. Roger Sr. resigned from the IPCC over the refusal to consider the urban heat island effect; Roger Jr. was investigated by a congressional committee and eventually pushed out of his tenured position at the University of Colorado in Boulder for daring to question the settled science.
An interesting piece on Project Daedelus, the British Interplanetary Societies proposal for an interstellar mission.
Never let them take the stars from your eyes.
The darkness of the night sky seems so ordinary that it is easy to forget how strange it actually is. If the Universe were infinite, eternal and static, with stars distributed more or less uniformly through space, then wherever we looked our line of sight should eventually… pic.twitter.com/CsCLFzqADw
— Erika  (@ExploreCosmos_) August 18, 2026
So that's it for this Sunday. Don't forget Sky Candy on Fridays and come back next Sunday for the Sunday Supplement.
