When Krakatoa Blew Up

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The biggest blast in history

The world is awed by the might of the blasts that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there was an explosion once that was incomparably greater. Those atomic bombs flatten­ed two cities, yet people a few dozen miles away were oblivious of the fact.

When the East Indies island of Krakatoa blew up, on August 27, 1883, the whole world knew about it. The noise was heard 3000 miles away. The great waves which the explosion caused in the sea reached the shores of four continents and were recorded 8000 miles away. An air-wave generated by the blast travelled right round the world, not once but several times; and where there had been a mountain half a mile high was now a hole a thousand feet deep and miles across.

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The Island of Krakatoa, Front Cover of "The Illustrated London News," 

8th September 1883

The Island of Krakatoa, Front Cover of

East Indies island of Krakatoa blew up, on August 27, 1883 

Red-hot debris covered an area larger than France, to a depth of sometimes 100 ft on land. For nearly a year afterwards the dust of the explosion, blown upwards for 30 miles, filled the high atmo­sphere over almost the whole globe. Even though there were no large towns within 100 miles of the volcano, 36,000 people lost their lives.
The biggest blast in history was caused by nothing more mysterious than the old-fashioned force that rattles the lid on a kettle. But the fire under the kettle was a mile-long pocket of seething lava and it changed a cubic mile of ocean into super-heated steam. The lid blew off, and the kettle exploded.
Krakatoa was a volcanic island of about 18 square miles in the Sunda Strait, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, between Java and Sumatra.

Exciting and enjoyable spectacular 

Krakatoa, East of Java

Krakatoa, East of Java

Amazon Price: $13.49 (as of 12/16/2009)Buy Now

Based on the true story of the Krakatoa volcano eruption, this "spectacular production features some of the most beautiful and awesome sights and sounds ever to grace the...screen" (Boxoffice)! Maximilian Schell (Deep Impact, A Bridge Too Far) leads a rousing ensemble cast in "an exciting and enjoyable spectacular on the high seas" (LA Herald-Examiner) that is "so buoyant and bracing you can almost smell the sea air" (Los Angeles Times)! Captain Hanson (Schell) of the Batavia Queen embarks on a perilous search for sunken treasure off the island of Krakatoa. To find a fortune in rare pearls, he must brave a boiling sea, douse an uprising by a horde of convicts, and outwit a greedy crew desperate for more than their fair shareonly to confront the most devastating and catastrophic volcanic explosion the modern world has ever felt!

Krakatoa 

by Simon Winchester

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (P.S.)

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (P.S.)

by: Simon Winchester

Amazon Price: $10.04 (as of 12/16/2009)Buy Now

Winchester specializes in detailed accounts that shine light into odd or forgotten corners of history. His two most recent successful efforts in that genre were THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN. Now he has crafted a vividly written book of 400-plus pages about an event that was over in a matter of hours. KRAKATOA is certainly full of digressions that have only tangential relevance to its main subject --- but those digressions are so well researched, beautifully written and just plain interesting that they become assets rather than liabilities. The reader does not really object to the fact that the eruption doesn't begin until past the halfway point in Winchester's text.

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Krakatoa by Simon Winchester is now available on Kindle

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Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)

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The ground was so hot it burnt right through the soles of my boots 

Early in the spring of 1883, there were warning sign£ Smoke and steam poured from recent fissures in the rock. A river of lava cut a wide swath through the tangled jungle. But the Dutch in Java and Suma­tra were not alarmed. Old Krakatoa had puffed and rumbled before. Even when the Dutch Captain Ferzenaar arrived in Batavia in August with a report that two new volcanoes had appeared on Krakatoa, the Dutch were not impressed. There were scores of volcanoes in the East Indies; besides, Krakatoa was a hundred miles away.
The ground was so hot it burnt right through the soles of my boots,' Captain Ferzenaar said. Well, if it was as warm as that on Krakatoa the few natives who lived there would have to take to their boats and wait until the island cooled off.
Captain Ferzenaar was the last white man to set foot on Krakatoa before the eruption. By this time navigation through Sunda Strait was becoming difficult. Several captains turned back when they saw the narrows covered with a foot-thick layer of cinders. But the skipper of one American freighter battened down the hatches and calmly sailed through the hissing sea. His cargo-paraffin!
No one after him attempted the passage. By now Krakatoa's rumblings had grown into a continuous, angry roar heard along the entire east coast of Java. In Buitenzorg, 61 miles from Krakatoa, people were seeking shelter from what they thought was a gather­ing thunderstorm.

Krakatoa and Neighboring Islets before an After 

Krakatoa and Neighboring Islets before the Volcanic Eruption of 1883Krakatoa and Neighboring Islets after the Volcanic Eruption of 1883

The volcano had ceased to exist 

In the afternoon of August 26,' R. D. M. Verbeek wrote in his description of the catastrophe, 'the low rumbling was interrupted by sharp, reverberating detonations. They grew louder and more frequent. People were terrified. Night came, but no one thought of sleeping. Towards morning the incessant noise was drowning every other sound. Suddenly, shortly before seven, there was a tremendous explo­sion. Buildings shook, walls cracked, and doors flew open as if pushed by invisible hands. Every­body rushed into the streets. Another deafening explosion, and then everything was quiet as if the volcano had ceased to exist.'
The volcano had ceased to exist. Seething with the expansion of its gases, the white-hot lava found temporary outlets in the two craters seen by Fer-zenaar, which normally acted as safety valves. But the pressure became too great. Unimaginable energies were straining against hundreds of feet of solid rock overhead. The rock heaved, buckled; on the evening of August 26 it cracked wide open like the wall of a faulty boiler.
A stream of lava burst forth in a deafening roar. Seconds later the sea rushed into the opening. On contact with the hot lava, the water changed into super-heated steam. Colossal blocks of granite and obsidian rocketed upwards amid a cloud of dust and smoke. Again the sea rushed in, battling with the pent-up lava, changing into expanding, exploding super-heated steam, breaking down barrier after barrier of rock.

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No one knows how many times the white-hot magma pushed back the sea and how often the sea returned to the assault. In the end the water won. Early in the morning of August 27 the sea reached the volcanic centre of the island. Even the fury of the previous explosions was but a faint prelude to the final cataclysm as the heart was ripped out of Kraka-toa and 14 cubic miles of rock streaked into the sky.
The sun was blotted out behind a curtain of ebony torn by jagged lightning. Miles away, Krakatoa's pyrotechnics awed the sailors of the British ship Charles Bal, who saw the island shoot up over the horizon, 'shaped like a pine tree brilliantly illumi­nated by electric flashes'. The sea was covered with fish, floating belly up on the churning water.
Long afterwards came the noise-the loudest ever heard by human ears. 'The concussions were deafen­ing,' wrote Lloyd's agent in Batavia. They hammered every eardrum in Java and Sumatra and put fear into the hearts of Borneo's headhunters. People in Victoria Plains, Australia, 1700 miles to the east, were startled by what seemed to be artillery fire. The sound-waves travelled 2968 miles westward to Rodrigues Island near Madagascar.

The day the world exploded 

The Day the World Exploded: The Earthshaking Catastrophe at Krakatoa

The Day the World Exploded: The Earthshaking Catastrophe at Krakatoa

by: Simon Winchester

Amazon Price: $19.54 (as of 12/15/2009)Buy Now

In this illustrated account based on Simon Winchester's bestselling Krakatoa, the colossal explosion is brought to vivid life. From the ominous warnings leading up to the eruption to the wave of killings it provoked, here is an engaging and insightful look at what happened on the day the world exploded.

World Disasters - Krakatoa 

World Disasters - Krakatoa

World Disasters - Krakatoa

by: Don Nardo

Amazon Price: (as of 12/16/2009)Buy Now

Explores the eruption of Krakatoa in its cultural, historical, and geographic contexts and discusses the effect on both people and environment.

 

With the noise, concentric waves of air started on I their way round the globe. A day and a half after the explosion, the first of them hit London from the west. Then a second wave rushed over the city from the east. Four times the eastbound wave swept over London-and over Berlin, Leningrad and Valencia as well-and three times it swept back. The strato­spheric see-saw continued for more than ten days before the blast had spent its force.
Far more violent was the effect of the eruption on the sea. In Anjer, on the west coast of Java, a retired sea captain suddenly noticed a new island that had bobbed up in the strait. The next moment he was running for his life. The island was a wall of water, 50 ft high, advancing across the narrows at incred­ible speed, battering down the wharves, engulfing Anjer, racing uphill, smashing everything in its path. The wave flung a log at him, and he went down. When he regained consciousness he was sitting on the top of a tree half a mile inland, stripped of every shred of clothing but otherwise unharmed.
He was one of the few who saw the wave and lived to describe its fury. Anjer had vanished. The wave, rising to a height of 100 ft, wiped out scores of villages and killed thousands of people. On the coast of Sumatra, the wave tore the warship Beroun from her moorings and drove her, anchor dragging, 2 miles inland, where it left her, stranded in the jungle, 30 ft above sea level.
The wave raced across the entire width of the Indian Ocean; when it reached Cape Town, 5100 miles away, it was still over a foot high. It rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned northwards into the Atlantic, along the coast of Africa, and at last spent itself in the English Channel.

 

Whole districts of what is now Indonesia were buried under ashes; the jungles were choked, the rice paddies changed into deserts. The sky was so filled with ashes that for a time lamps were needed all day in Batavia.
But what covered the land and the sea was only a small part of the volcano. Most of Krakatoa's solid rock had been pulverised and blasted to a height of 150,000 ft. Clouds of volcanic dust hung suspended in the stratosphere for months. Air currents carried them across oceans and continents. All over the world, the rays of the sun were filtered through a veil spun in the depths of Sunda Strait. In Paris, New York, Cairo and London, the setting sun appeared blue, leaden, green and copper-coloured, and at night the earth was steeped in the light of a green moon and green stars.
hen the colours faded, and Krakatoa's magnificent shroud disappeared. The final chapter in its history seemed to be over. Krakatoa was utterly dead. Nothing was left of it but a few square miles of rock buried under a mountain of ashes. All plants, insects, birds and mammals had been dissolved in a fiery cloud.
Then a miracle happened-the miracle of the rebirth of life. Four months after the eruption, a botanist found an almost microscopic spider, gal­lantly spinning its web where nothing was to be caught. It had apparently drifted in on the wind.

Krakatoa - DVD 

The special effects in this movie will blow you away

Krakatoa

Krakatoa

Amazon Price: $26.99 (as of 12/16/2009)Buy Now

This is a re-enactment as well as a documentary. The combination of actual footage of natural disasters with CGI imagery, along with the very well re-created people and scenery of the 19th century is superb. The scope of destruction that was unleashed by this volcano is unbelievable. Watch it on a big screen TV with surround sound. You'll feel like the world is coming to an end. It's as exciting and jaw-dropping as any effects-laden blockbuster movie, but without being corny, because as over-the-top as it might be were it fiction, this actually happened.

 

Then, in a few years, came the grasses and shrubs, the worms, ants, snakes and birds. They arrived by air-seeds dropped by birds on their flight over the barren land; small caterpillars carried by the wind; beetles and butterflies winging their way over from Java and Sumatra. They arrived by water-eggs of worms and reptiles flung ashore with flotsam; snails and scorpions riding the waves on decayed tree trunks; pythons and crocodiles swimming across the narrows. Parasites clung to their bodies.
Plants and animals came by accident, but there was nothing accidental about the sequence in which they established themselves. It was a rigid chrono­logical pattern telescoping millennia into months. It was necessary for some forms of life to be there first before others could live.
For a while some forms prospered through the absence of enemies and competitors. In about 1910, Krakatoa was overrun by swarms of ants; ten years later, when there were plenty of birds and reptiles, the ants had all but disappeared. By 1919 the first small clusters of trees had taken root, and by 1924 they had grown into a continuous forest. A few years later, climbing plants were choking the trees to death and transforming the forest into a tropical jungle with orchids, butterflies, snakes, numberless birds and bats.

 

Krakatoa became a naturalist's paradise, and the Dutch made it a nature reserve and allowed no one but accredited scientists to set foot on the island. They worked out a complete inventory of life on Krakatoa. They counted the steadily growing num­ber of new arrivals and observed how they lived with each other and fought each other. They even dis­covered several sub-species-birds and butterflies with peculiar characteristics not to be found any­where else. Krakatoa was not only drawing on the forms of life around it; it was creating a life of its own. Then, one day, the scientists discovered that another sort of life was stirring on Krakatoa. The old volcano was by no means dead.

 

Deep down under its rocky foundation a pocket of lava was seeking an outlet for its energies. The bottom of the inland sea was heaving and buckling again. A submarine cone was building up; on January 26, 1928, it broke the surface and showed its top, a flat, ugly island a few hundred feet across, which the waves washed away a few days later.
A year passed. Then suddenly a geyser began to spout steam and ashes. Sulphurous fumes drifted over the ocean. Again the sea was covered with dead fish floating belly up.
The new geyser is still there. It is a part of the old crater rim with mud deposited on its top and a flue in its centre-a safety valve for the stupendous pressure generated by the lava pocket underneath. The natives call the new volcano 'Anak Krakatoa', 'Child of Krakatoa'. No name could be more ominous.

 

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