Links to Part II and Part III. Other Krakatau posts: Krakatoa: a blast from the past Krakatoa skies: when the Sun turned blue The rise and fall of Anak Krakatau All eruptions have history. Volcanoes may sometimes appear to erupt out of the blue; the mountain may not even have been recognized as a volcano,…
Let’s start with a question. Which country do you think has the most frequent volcanic eruptions? Before you read on (or peek below for the answer), take a minute to think about it. You can probably guess that Australia is not a front runner. In fact, only two or three countries readily come to mind.…
Sulawesi is the unknown Indonesia. Some may remember it under its Portuguese name of Celebes. It is part of the northern chain of Indonesian islands which runs from Borneo to New Guinea. The island has a disjointed shape, appearing as a connection of peninsulas running in random directions, like an uncoordinated octopus. The four peninsulas…
There is more to Flores. The island is spectacular in any case. The Portuguese explorers called it Cabo de Flores (Cape of Flowers) because of the red-flowered flame trees, dotted between the palm trees of the north coast. The landscape is varied, from low-land savannah to volcanic rain forest. It is not as wet here as…
Most people have by now noticed that Gunung Agung has stopped erupting. And to understand why that has happened, and what will happen soon, we need to look at what happened during the eruption. We also need to look at what is currently happening. When a volcano is showing no visible signs of activity, we…
There was a lot going in the 1960’s. This was the time of the generation battle, where the children who had grown up in a time of austerity and a cold war, rebelled and looked for something different – exploring, ignoring the boundaries but never quite finding what they were looking for. Martin Luther King…
Just after 4pm, the phones started ringing at the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill. Caller after caller reported seeing the sun. The date was September 27, 1950, and the place was Edinburgh, Scotland. Seeing the sun in Scotland can be a bit of a rarity, but even the Scots knew that the sun should not…
Volcanoes can be costly. The Kilauea eruption of Feb 28, 1955 destroyed 21 houses, 10km of road, 4000 acres of sugar plantations and one coffee plantation: the damage was 40 million dollar in today’s prices. The cost of Mount St Helens was 1 billion dollar. Both events were eclipsed by Eyjafjallajokull: its price tag of…
According to local news and reports from the BPBD in Indonesia evacuation is taking place of three villages close to the volcano. So far 1 200 people have been evacuated using military trucks. Furthermore 2 000 masks have been distributed to those who are waiting to be evacuated to help protect them against the heavy sulphur fumes.…
It has often been pointed out that the deadliest volcano is the one you did not know about. This is our dilemma. When you try to identify the potentially most dangerous ones, by necessity you have to go out on a limb to find those that are not well known nor well studied and there…