130 years after explosion, 'child of Krakatau' breathes fire

In August 1883, HJG Ferzenaar had been observing the island, which had been spewing fire for months.

“Measurements are still too dangerous. At least I wouldn’t want to take responsibility for sending a surveyor here,” Ian Thornton, the author of a book on the event, quoted Ferzenaar as saying.

The volcano exploded and collapsed into the sea on August 27, 1883.

The series of huge eruptions was so powerful that they were heard 7,725 kilometres away on the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues near Mauritius.

The landmass formed by the volcanoes Rakata, Danan and Perbuwatan, up to 800 metres high, collapsed. Water surged into the empty magma chamber, resulting in tsunamis of up to 40 metres in height.

The hot ash and tsunamis it created destroyed 150 villages on the coasts of the islands of Sumatra and Java and killed an estimated 40,000 people.

The explosion was at least 10,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, experts have calculated.

The first officer of the US ship WH Besse witnessed the spectacle more than 100 kilometres north-east of Krakatoa, as it was also known.

“It had gradually been growing dark since 9am and by the time the squall struck us, it was darker than any night I ever saw; this was midnight at noon, a heavy shower of ashes came with the squall, the air being so thick it was difficult to breathe,” the mariner wrote.

“The terrible noises from the volcano, the sky filled with forked lightning, running in all directions and making the darkness more intense than ever ... all expecting that the last days of the Earth had come.” A huge cloud of volcanic ash entering the upper atmosphere caused vivid red sunsets in parts of the world. In New York, fire brigades were deployed because residents suspected a fire.

Because the dust particles reflect sunlight in space, the global climate was significantly cooler.

It was also the first disaster to be reported immediately throughout the world. A few years before, undersea telegraph cables were installed, enabling people on different continents to communicate almost instantly.

Anak Krakatau, or “child of Krakatau” in Indonesian, rose above sea level in 1930 from the centre of the underwater caldera left by the original volcano.

The new cone spews ash and flaming rocks regularly, and tourists are advised to stay outside a 1-kilometre exclusion zone.

Indonesian botanist Tukirin Partomihardjo has led numerous research expeditions by both local and foreign scientists since he began studying the island in 1981.

“Anak Krakatau provides a rare opportunity for scientists to examine how life takes hold in a new ecosystem,” said Partomihardjo, who works at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

In 1999, he and another Indonesian scientist, along with a cameraman for a documentary film company, had a brush with death when Anak Krakatau erupted as soon as they arrived at the foot of the volcano.

“It was raining rocks and ash and I could hear fiery rocks buzzing near us like bullets,” he said. 

“Trees were burned around us. I thought my time was up because there was nowhere to hide,” said the scientist, who once spent 45 days on the uninhabited island volcano.

The island group known as the Krakatau Volcanic Complex consists of Rakata, Sertung, Panjang and Anak Krakatau islands.

According to local mythology, the original Krakatau emerged after King Rakata wanted to separate his warring sons. That was when the islands of Sumatra and Java were still one and Rakata’s sons commanded rival kingdoms.

Rakata took a clay jug and poured water along the border and, legend has it, a 30-kilometre wide strait between Sumatra and Java emerged. As the story goes, the jug left by Rakata became the volcano.

The Indonesian archipelago is located on the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean. Sumatra is located at a subduction zone where tectonic plates slide under one another.

Tensions often discharged volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes, such as in 2004, when an earthquake under the sea west of Sumatra triggered the devastating tsunami that claimed 180,000 lives in Indonesia alone.

Anak Krakatau is now 305 metres high and is growing every year.

“It has erupted more than 100 times since 2011,” says Surono, the head of the Volcanic Institute.