Loudest Explosion

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 16

Loudest Explosion

LONG drum -roll echoed over the ‘Strait of Sunda on the evening of August 26, 1883, from an island off Sumatra. The warm air was suddenly punctured by a series of sharp terrifying detonations. Then in a mounting fury the sound of thunder and the explosions: fused into a colossal and hideous uproar as Krakatoa, the island which was in reality the crater of an underwater volcano, erupted. Here was something more terrifying than any horror man could devise. Far below the ocean bed, the pressure of expanding gases heaved a mighty shoulder against hundreds of feet of solid rock that shifted, buckled, split wide open. White-hot lava boiled out of the rift in the island’s crown

and hurrying down, met the sea in great clouds of super-heated steam. Next morning, against the river of lava, the ocean smashed its way to the island’s volcanic centre. In the explosion that followed, 14 cubic miles of rock were hurled skywards in a blinding confusion of steam and smoke and dust that put a curtain round the sun. Where ‘Krakatoa’s mountain had stood 2500 feet high, there was now a hole 1000 feet deep and miles across. The blast sent an -atmospheric pressure wave or oscillation racing round the earth at 700 miles an hour, For ten days air currents battled in the skies of Europe. A tidal wave moved out from Krakatoa that swept across the Indizn Ocean, turned the Cape, veered

north into the Atlantic, and finally spent itself. in the English Channel. A warship torn from her moorings on the coast of Sumatra was tossed two miles inland and dropped into jungle 30 feet above sea-level. Scores of villages disappeared behind the red hot debris that in some parts covered the ground to a depth of 100 feet; 36,000 people died, mostly by drowning. And for twelve months after, high in the air currents 30 miles above the earth, the dust that was Krakatoa travelled the globe. Next week, sixty-eight years later, August 26 falls on a Sunday as it did then, and at 8.45 p.m., in The Moon was Green, the story of Krakatoa will be told from 3ZB.