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WONDERS OF NATURE
Volcano Krakatau. Nature miracle
More than a hundred years have passed since the monstrous explosion thundered over the Sunda Strait. Echoes of this terrible disaster still resound in books and oral stories, newspaper articles and movies. And the inhabitants of the islands of Java and Sumatra will never forget her. And the great-grandchildren of the witnesses of those terrible days retell the details of the cataclysm to the children, just as the children of the inhabitants of Hiroshima tell their children about what their grandparents experienced in forty-five...
The eruption of Krakatau - a small island-volcano in the strait between Java and Sumatra - began on May 20, 1883. Prior to this, Krakatoa had not been active for two hundred years and was considered extinct. But suddenly, a column of black smoke and volcanic ash appeared above its crater, rising to an eleven-kilometer height. At a great distance from the volcano, up to Batavia, the main city of the Netherlands Indies (now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia), tremors were felt, and residents of villages on the banks of the Sunda Strait heard powerful explosions. Then silence reigned for three weeks, but from mid-June the volcano "earned" with renewed vigor. In August, three craters appeared at Krakatoa instead of one, and they all threw out ash and volcanic gases. The area of the island has increased from twelve to thirty square kilometers. On August 26, in the afternoon, a menacing rumble was heard in the vicinity of the volcano. By nightfall, it had become so intense that people on the whole island of Java could not sleep. Above Krakatoa, lightning flashed in black clouds. A thick layer of ash fell on the decks of ships sailing through the strait, and St. Elmo's fires flared on the masts and rigging - so the air was saturated with electricity. And on August 27, at about ten o'clock in the morning, an incredible explosion was heard. Volcanic gases, sand and large debris flew up to a height of thirty kilometers, and the ash rose more than seventy! The roar of the explosion was heard over three and a half thousand kilometers - on the island of Sri Lanka and in the center of Australia. It even reached the island of Rodriguez, located in the east of the Indian Ocean, five thousand kilometers from Krakatoa! On the island of Java, even a hundred and fifty kilometers from the volcano, a blast wave tore doors off their hinges, and plaster crumbled from the walls from its impact. An hour after the explosion, Jakarta, which is two hundred kilometers from the volcano, plunged into darkness, as clouds of ash completely hid the sun. On the shores of the Sunda Strait, tropical forests were destroyed everywhere, and the soil was covered with gray mud, ash, pieces of lava and uprooted trees. The corpses of people and animals lay everywhere. The sea around Krakatau was covered with a solid carpet of pumice stones, so thick that the ships could not break through the floating barrier. Pieces of pumice on the same day were found in the coastal waters of Australia and the Maldives. But most of all, the "seaquake" caused by a terrible explosion did the most trouble. The resulting giant tsunami wave hit the shores of Sumatra and Java with a monstrous forty-meter wall. About three hundred cities and villages with their surrounding fields and plantations were wiped off the face of the earth. More than six thousand fishing boats sank. Thirty-six thousand people died, hundreds of thousands were left homeless. It was completely destroyed, in particular, the population of the island of Sebezi, located twenty kilometers from the volcano. The Dutch warship - the gunboat Burrow - was abandoned by a tsunami three kilometers from the coast into the depths of the forest thicket. Even ninety kilometers from Krakatoa, the height of the tsunami wave was fifteen meters! She reached the island of Sri Lanka, hitting the shore here with a five-meter shaft, outraged on the shores of Australia, Africa and South America. It was felt by ships even in the English Channel. Unusual phenomena, but, fortunately, without tragic consequences, were also observed in the atmosphere. Shortly after the eruption, circles (“halos”) appeared around the sun, and the sun itself acquired an unusual greenish, and sometimes bluish tint. This phenomenon was explained by the presence of the finest volcanic dust in the upper atmosphere. As it was carried by air currents, the "green sun" was also seen by the inhabitants of Sri Lanka, then the islands of Madagascar, even later - the Africans and, finally, the Brazilians. Due to all the same ash that was in the air for several months, amazingly bright red sunrises and sunsets were noted everywhere on our planet all the next winter and spring. The flaming sky inspired poets and artists to create new romantic masterpieces. And looking at the landscapes of Claude Monet or rereading Tennyson's poems, you now involuntarily recall the formidable cause of the fiery flashes that so agitated them. The lines of the English poet Tennyson, by the way, very accurately convey the picture of unusual evening dawns in the spring of 1854: Day after day a bloody dawnAn alarming sunset blazed... The explosion of the Krakatoa volcano was the most powerful recorded by science. Its energy, according to modern nuclear physicists, was equivalent to the power of four hundred hydrogen bombs! True, according to indirect data, it can be assumed that the catastrophes associated with the eruptions of the Indonesian volcano Tambora on the island of Java in 1815 and especially the volcano on the island of Santorin near Crete three and a half thousand years ago were even more powerful. The volcanic depression-caldera on Santorini is four times larger than on Krakatoa, which indicates a much greater force of the explosion of the Greek volcano. Many archaeologists suggest that it was this monstrous explosion and the tsunami caused by it that destroyed the Cretan-Mycenaean civilization at one time. And some especially enthusiastic lovers of bold hypotheses even see it as the reason for the disappearance of the legendary Atlantis. The shores of the islands of Indonesia, devastated as a result of the eruption of Krakatoa, gradually healed the wounds inflicted by the disaster. The jungle and mangrove forests have turned green again, the birds and animals have returned. And now only people are afraid to live in close proximity to a formidable volcano. However, the nature of Indonesia only benefited from this. Now, on the Javanese Ujungkulon peninsula, protruding from the south into the Sunda Strait, a National Park has been set up, striking with the richness of its fauna and flora. The relatively small densely populated island of Java, in fact, has almost not preserved untouched corners of the wild. And on Ujungkulon, where there are no large settlements, no rice fields, no coffee and banana plantations, there are clouded leopard and gibbon, bear marten - binturong and red wolf, Javanese boar and wild forest bull - banteng. Only here live the last forty or fifty Javanese one-horned rhinos on Earth. Only the depopulation of the peninsula as a result of the eruption gave them a chance to survive. In the rest of Java, these rarest animals have long been exterminated. The National Park now includes the islands formed after the explosion at the site of the volcano. Krakatau itself as a result of this disaster completely disappeared. Only a small part of one of the three craters remained sticking out above the surface of the water, showing the classic section of a lava cone. In place of the rest of the volcanic structure, a depression was formed with a diameter of seven kilometers and a depth of three hundred meters. However, the destroyed volcano did not stop its activity. Half a century later, it again began to show activity, and in 1952 a cone of a new, young volcanic structure appeared from the sea waters, which gradually began to rise above the strait, increasing its height and area due to small but frequent eruptions. Now the island-volcano has reached a height of two hundred and fifty meters and a kilometer in length and continues to grow. He was given the name Anak-Krakatau ("Child of Krakatau"). A column of smoke above it is clearly visible from ships passing through the Sunda Strait. Author: B.Wagner
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