When The Lid Blew Off

By davidbunch

The world is awed by the might of the blasts that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there was once an explosion that was incomparably greater. Those atomic bombs flattened two cities, yet people a few dozen miles away were oblivious of the fact. All was over instantly, and almost instantly survivors began clearing up the rubble. The surrounding landscape looks as it did before. But when Krakatoa blew up, on August 27, 1883, the whole world knew about it. The sound waves were noted 3000 miles away. People hundreds of miles away were killed. The great waves the explosion caused in the sea reached the shores of four continents, and were recorded 8000 miles away. An airwave generated by the blast traveled clear around the world, not once but several times. And where had been a mountain half a mile high was now a hole a thousand feet deep and miles across. There was nobody left to clear away the rubble on Krakatoa.

In fact, there was not much left of Krakatoa itself. Red-hot debris covered an area the size of Texas, to a depth of sometimes 100 feet on land, and raising new islands where the rain of rock built up the bed of the ocean. For almost a year afterward the dust of the explosion, blown upward for 30 miles, filled the high atmosphere over the whole globe. Even though there were no large towns within 100 miles of the volcano, 36,000 persons lost their lives. The biggest blast in history was not caused by atomic fission; no staff of scientists was needed to set it off. It was caused by nothing more mysterious than the old-fashioned force that rattles the lid on a teakettle. But the fire under the kettle was a mile-long pocket of seething lava and it changed a cubic mile of ocean into superheated steam. The lid blew off and the kettle exploded as well. Krakatoa was an island of about 18 square miles in the Sunda Strait, in the Dutch East Indies, between Java and Sumatra.

Early in the spring of 1883, there were warning signs. 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 Batavia and Palembang and other places on Java and Sumatra were not alarmed. There had always been some volcanic activity in the Sunda Strait. As to the natives' tales of the big explosion that in olden times had split the earth and destroyed the world, why should anybody take them seriously? It was ascertained later that those tales were based on reality.

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