Boom Yesterday. There's Always A Boom Yesterday.

Today, August 26, back in 1883, the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa blew its top.

You may have thought Vesuvius was big, but it was small beans compared to Krakatoa. I mean, in terms of volcano eruptions in recorded history, Krakatoa IS IT.

I mean, the explosion of Krakatoa was THE LOUDEST SOUND EVER IN RECORDED HISTORY AND WAS HEARD 3,000 FREAKING MILES AWAY (WHICH IS TOTALLY AMAZING SINCE THE RADIUS OF THE EARTH IS ONLY 4,000 MILES AND ITS CIRCUMFERENCE IS ONLY 24,000 MILES, MEANING THAT THE BLAST WAS HEARD ACROSS 6,000 OF THE 24,000 MILES OF THE PLANET’S CIRCUMFERENCE)!!!

WOW!!!

So, okay.

Big HUGE freaking volano explosion.

I mean, if planetary-scale disasters are your thing (volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis) are your thing, then Indonesia is your place!

EXCERPTS:

  • Although no one is known to have been killed as a result of the initial explosion, the tsunamis it generated had disastrous results, killing some 36,000 people, and wiping out a number of settlements, including Telok Batong in Sumatra, and Sirik and Semarang in Java.
  • An additional 1,000 or so people died from the effects of volcanic fumes and ashes.
  • Ships as far away as South Africa rocked as tsunamis hit them, and the bodies of victims were found floating in the ocean for weeks after the event.
  • There are even numerous documented reports of groups of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice and washing up on the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption.
  • The 1883 eruption was amongst the most severe volcanic explosions in modern times (VEI of 6, equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT — by way of comparison, the biggest bomb ever made by man, Tsar Bomba, had an explosive power of around 50 megatons).
  • Concussive air waves from the explosions travelled seven times around the world, and the sky was darkened for days afterwards.
  • The island of Rakata [where Krakatoa is located] itself largely ceased to exist as over two thirds of its exposed land area was blown to dust, and its surrounding ocean floor was drastically altered.
  • The eruption produced spectacular sunsets throughout the world for many months afterwards, as a result of sunlight reflected from suspended dust particles ejected by the volcano high into Earth’s atmosphere. British artist William Ashcroft made hundreds of color sketches of the red sunsets half-way around the world from Krakatoa in the years after the eruption.
  • In 2004, researchers proposed the idea that the blood-red sky shown in Edvard Munch’s famous 1893 painting The Scream is also an accurate depiction of the sky over Norway after the eruption.
  • Additionally, it [the island where Krakatoa lies] has also been a case study of island biogeography and founder populations in an ecosystem being built from the ground up, virtually sterilized, certainly with no macroscopic life surviving the explosion.
  • The island is still active, with its most recent eruptive episode having begun in 1994. Since then, quiet periods of a few days have alternated with almost continuous eruptions, with occasional much larger explosions.
  • Since the 1950s, the island has grown at an average rate of five inches (12.7 cm) per week.
  • Reports in 2005 indicated that activity at Anak Krakatau was increasing.

DUM! DUM! DUM!

GET THE STORY.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

10 thoughts on “Boom Yesterday. There's Always A Boom Yesterday.”

  1. Why do I get the feeling that you and I use the same source (Wikipedia) for our “On this day in history” trivia?

    –arthur

  2. This event was the basis for a delightful children’s book, The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois. (It was from reading the book as a child that I first learned of Krakatoa.)

    The story is a fanciful romance about an amateur balloonist who builds a giant balloon-house in which to sail the world, only to be forced down on Krakatoa (as fate would have it) a few days before the fateful eruption. (This isn’t a spoiler, as the whole story is told in flashback.)

    What, and who, he finds there is a wonderful smorgasbord, both figuratively and literally, combining imagination, invention, whimsy, wish fulfillment, and silliness. (Mr. du Bois certainly loves food, and balloons.)

  7. And then there is Toba, and Yellowstone. Toba is where Java and Sumatra used to be one island.

    Tambora may have led to the years without summer and the following Yellow Plague that brought down the Roman-British in Britania Majoris.

  8. Simon Winchester’s book on Krakatoa is very interesting. He contends that since the Dutch abandoned some of their Indonesian settlements after the explosion, the people sought comfort in radical Islam. I think he’s stretching it a bit there.

    However, his description of his visit to Anak-Krakatoa is fascinating.

  9. But history also records “the shot heard round the world” so, like, wouldn’t that have been the loudest sound ever recorded in history? I mean, ’cause neither was really “recorded”, right?

    In fact, I wasn’t there to hear it, so did it really make a sound at all?

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