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Le 15 janvier 2022, le royaume des Tonga a été violemment touché par une éruption volcanique et un tsunami qui ont dévasté une partie du pays. Malgré le traumatisme, le peuple tongien et les autorités ont travaillé ensemble au nettoyage afin de reconstruire le pays aussi vite que possible. Voici le bouleversant témoignage des différents acteurs qui ont participé à cet effort collectif.

On Saturday 15 January 2022, the Kingdom of Tonga was violently affected by the powerful eruption of the hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai underwater volcano. The eruption - one of the biggest in Tonga in the last 30 years - triggered a strong tsunami that devastated coastal areas

Tongatapu, like Tahiti, was visited by many early European navigators and was one of the first of the South Pacific islands to be charted in any detail. Though it was discovered (and named Amsterdam Island) by Tasman in January 1643 (Sharp 1968, 152-158), the first comments on the sand cays of the surrounding reefs were made by Cook during his second voyage, with the Resolution and Adventure, in October 1773. On this occasion Cook spent less than a week at Tongatapu, anchored in the northwest, and commented that "it would have taken up more time than I could spare to have surveyed these parts Minutely as there are a number of small Islots and reefs of rocks extending to the NE even further than we could see" (1961, 261). His naturalists, the Forsters, did not describe the cays, though Georg Forster remarked on the emersion of reef limestones on Tongatapu and its similarity to the continuing emergence of the land in Scandinavia (1777, I, 453). Cook returned on his last voyage in 1777, with the Resolution and Discovery, and stayed for a month. He anchored near modern Nuku'alofa and landed on Pangaimotu and possibly other islands (1967, 124-125, 155, 890). He charted the area but gave no description of the cays.

Country profiles on the state of coral reefs systems in the Pacific