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Krakatau
One of the books I bought on to my last trip to Sydney was Simon Winchester's Krakatoa - The Day The World Exploded - 27th August 1883.
Enthralling read. I never knew, for example, that 3 locals had been on the island the day the nearby beach first started erupting. They had to swim to their boat, the ground level was dropping that fast.
And a horrifying read too, after the first half of the book's diversions into Dutch history, the rise of tectonic theory, and so on, and got onto the actual 1883 eruption.
Imagine, for example, being on a wooden boat loaded with paraffin, in the very busy Sunda Strait, all too close to Krakatau in full eruption, as hot pumice cascades down onto your ship, and your rudder is red hot with repeated electrical strikes.
Let alone the final cataclysmic explosion, raising a tsunami 130ft high, dumping a Dutch warship two miles inland, and killing tens of thousands.
The same explosion was audible over 13% of the Earth's surface from Rodrigeuz Island near Madagscar, to Daly Waters, south of Darwin. It was clearly audible here in Perth. The loudest sound in recorded history. In Batavia, 130 miles away, it went off the scale of the city gasometer's pressure gauge - over two-and-a-half inchs of mercury. And it kept echoing around the world for the next fifteen days.
I'd already known about the effect the ash, blasted 30 kilometres into the sky, had on global sunsets in subsequent years; and how how the resultant caldera split the 800 metre tall volcano Rakata neatly down the middle at the same time the rest of Krakatau went away , but the sheer amount of detail and eyewitness reports astonishes.
The book goes on to explore all the ramifications of this, the first mega-disaster of the Information Age.
Apart from making 6 cubic kilometres of rock vanish off the face of the Earth of course, and killing more people than any eruption before or since.
Pumice rafts incorporating the skeletons of some of the 36,000 victims were still washing up in Africa a year later.
And it wasn't even the largest eruption known - Toba, at the far end of Sumatra, dumped half a metre of ash 1500 miles away, and is officially described as 'humungous' in geological jargon. Seriously, it is. Fortunately it went off 74000 years ago, altho Homo sapiens barely survived the experience anyway. Tambora, off in the other direction, erupted in 1815; Taupo, New Zealand in 180; and Katmai/Novarupta in Alaska in 1912, all outdid Krakatau in sheer tonnage.
I must try and track down the movie Krakatoa - East of Java - even if it is infamously bad, and they did get the locale 180° wrong.
Enthralling read. I never knew, for example, that 3 locals had been on the island the day the nearby beach first started erupting. They had to swim to their boat, the ground level was dropping that fast.
And a horrifying read too, after the first half of the book's diversions into Dutch history, the rise of tectonic theory, and so on, and got onto the actual 1883 eruption.
Imagine, for example, being on a wooden boat loaded with paraffin, in the very busy Sunda Strait, all too close to Krakatau in full eruption, as hot pumice cascades down onto your ship, and your rudder is red hot with repeated electrical strikes.
Let alone the final cataclysmic explosion, raising a tsunami 130ft high, dumping a Dutch warship two miles inland, and killing tens of thousands.
The same explosion was audible over 13% of the Earth's surface from Rodrigeuz Island near Madagscar, to Daly Waters, south of Darwin. It was clearly audible here in Perth. The loudest sound in recorded history. In Batavia, 130 miles away, it went off the scale of the city gasometer's pressure gauge - over two-and-a-half inchs of mercury. And it kept echoing around the world for the next fifteen days.
I'd already known about the effect the ash, blasted 30 kilometres into the sky, had on global sunsets in subsequent years; and how how the resultant caldera split the 800 metre tall volcano Rakata neatly down the middle at the same time the rest of Krakatau went away , but the sheer amount of detail and eyewitness reports astonishes.
The book goes on to explore all the ramifications of this, the first mega-disaster of the Information Age.
Apart from making 6 cubic kilometres of rock vanish off the face of the Earth of course, and killing more people than any eruption before or since.
Pumice rafts incorporating the skeletons of some of the 36,000 victims were still washing up in Africa a year later.
And it wasn't even the largest eruption known - Toba, at the far end of Sumatra, dumped half a metre of ash 1500 miles away, and is officially described as 'humungous' in geological jargon. Seriously, it is. Fortunately it went off 74000 years ago, altho Homo sapiens barely survived the experience anyway. Tambora, off in the other direction, erupted in 1815; Taupo, New Zealand in 180; and Katmai/Novarupta in Alaska in 1912, all outdid Krakatau in sheer tonnage.
I must try and track down the movie Krakatoa - East of Java - even if it is infamously bad, and they did get the locale 180° wrong.