Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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rumblings were heard and a lighthouse was seen to move. Ships'
captains filed anxious reports. Ten days later a thick white column
of smoke and ash rose from the volcano to a height of about
11,000 metres.²
The Times
reported these events on 3 July, but
they turned out merely to be polite preliminaries.
The sound of the main cataclysm of late August radiated
many thousands of miles around the Pacific, being heard on the
west coast of Australia to the southeast, and Rodriguez Island
and Diego Garcia to the west. A tsunami followed this huge
breaking wave of sound, falling eventually on Ceylon and the
east coast of India, and making tide-gauges flicker as far away as
Port Elizabeth in South Africa, Grytviken in South Georgia
and Biarritz in France. Even in Birmingham, England, the
calm rustle of the trees at Edgbaston were disturbed as the local
observatory registered changes in air pressure as the shock-waves
ran around the globe.³ Noise and tides pass very quickly, and
leave no trace. What did remain, however, and for months, was
a cloud of ash dust and gas that encircled the planet in the upper
atmosphere: 'where mountain Krakatua once stood, the sea now
Eruption of the
Volcano Perbouwatan,
on the Island of Krakatoa
,
1883, engraving.
