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Loading... Krakatau 1883, The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effectsby Tom Simkin
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From the Blurb: On August 26 and 27, 1883, the island volcano Krakatau erupted, ejecting more than four cubic miles of debris and creating a huge plume of gas and ashes that rose to an altitude of thirty miles. Spectacular, fiery sunsets resulted, lighting the skies of North America and Europe in the following months. This was one of history's most terrifying and destructive volcanic eruptions. Great sea waves crested to heights of 118 feet, crashing on the coasts of Java and Sumatra and killing more than 30,000 people. The eruption's loudest blasts were heard nearly 3,000 miles away. Simkin and Fiske have gathered eighty-eight eyewitness accounts, describing the events in the words of people who were there, and have selected twenty-eight scientific interpretations of the various phenomena written over the last one-hundred years. They have illustrated the book with more than 250 photographs, engravings, drawings, and maps, and have traced an extensive chronology of events. The result is a comprehensive volume on this benchmark event-history's most famous eruption. In addition to geologists, oceanographers will be interested in the devastating sea waves, meteorologists in the worldwide atmospheric effects, biologists in the return of life to barren island remnants, but any general reader will be fascinated by the eyewitness accounts of this spectacular eruption and its truly global effects. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)551.2Natural sciences and mathematics Earth sciences & geology Geology, Hydrology Meteorology Volcanoes, earthquakes, thermal waters and gasesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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(1)The effect of the explosion itself;
(2)The gravitational collapse of the ejecta column, dropping several cubic kilometers of ejecta into the ocean;
(3)The collapse of more than half of the island of Krakatau into the sea after the supporting magma was ejected;
(4)The impact of a low-angle pyroclastic flow.
Option 3 was the most common for years, reinforced by the discovery, shortly after the eruption, that a 300-fathom deep sea lead could not find bottom in the former location of an island peak originally several hundred feet high (by the time modern depth-sounding equipment came along subsequent activity and continued slumping had left the area much shallower). Further corroboration came from a ship only 12 miles from the eruption that reported a current toward the volcano so strong (crew estimated it at 12 to 16 knots) that it was feared the vessel’s bow would be pulled off by the strain on the anchors.
Option 2 seems to be currently favored, as more information has become available about the nature of pyroclastic flows (alas, the information usually came the hard way for people downstream from the same).
However, there’s some interesting support for Number 4, as well. Careful examination of tide gauge records showed that the center of the wave pattern was not centered on Krakatau Island but some distance to the northeast. At the time of the original eruption the idea of directional pyroclastic flows was not understood; it was believed that all volcanoes erupted straight up (reinforced by observations of Vesuvius, which normal erupted this way). Even after obvious directional flows at Mt. Pelee, Mt. Lassen, and Mt. St. Helens the average mental image of a volcano is probably something that shoots straight up in the air.
I suspect the actual cause is, as usual, a combination of several above.
Another intriguing fact was the discovery that air waves from the eruption could couple with sea waves, intensifying both and perhaps partially explaining why sounds and sea movement from the eruption were noted so far away. Based on this coupling, the total energy released was between 100 and 150 megatons.
There are some nice color plates, including illustrations from the 1884 expedition, drawings of atmospheric phenomena, and more recent photographs. There’s also, surprisingly, a photograph of Krakatau in eruption in 1883 – not the August cataclysm but an earlier eruption in May.
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