Japan will monitor the long-term climate repercussions of Saturday's huge undersea volcanic eruption in the South Pacific in case they have an impact on the country.
“We don’t know if (volcanic) aerosols will reach the stratosphere and affect the weather,” said Naoyuki Hasegawa, director-general of the Meteorological Agency, in a news conference on Wednesday. “We will monitor if there will be such change.”
Saturday's disaster near Tonga reminded some of a similar event in the Philippines thirty years ago — an eruption that may have led to poor crop yields in Japan, thanks to a colder summer two years later.