Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
only is the man on the bridge screaming, but the whole sky and
the landscape below it.
The Royal Society brought together a committee to assemble
information about the Krakatoa eruption, publishing in
The
Times
and elsewhere in February 1884 a request for accounts of
ash fall, pumice, barometric phenomena and 'exceptional effects
of light and colour in the atmosphere' to be sent to them.¹6 The
committee reported in 1888. Ascroft's awareness on 8 September
1883 that something odd was happening was later corroborated
exactly by the Hon. Rollo Russell, a member of the committee
living in Surrey. He looked back at his diary on 9 November when
he first noticed that the skies were displaying 'a very striking
or extraordinary character'. He saw that on 8 September he had
observed 'a fine red sunset with after-glow', adding: 'this is worth
remarking, because I had never previously used the expression
“after-glow”'.¹7 Thereafter, he noted a kaleidoscope of colour-
ful effects at sunset: on 26 September 'light pink cirrus stripe';
3 October 'red and yellow sunset'; 20 October 'fine reddish sun-
set with bright isolated cloud and slight low cirrus'. The inten-
sity of effect began to increase its pace the following month
when Russell further noticed bright green opalescent light,
green haze, and bright opalescent yellows. In early March 1884 he
reported 'a slight repetition of the sky-illumination, lasting only
30 minutes, but during March the glare completely vanished,
and no illumination whatever appeared in a clear sky after sunset.
During the remainder of the year the sunsets were uncommonly
free from colour.'
Reports came to the committee from San Remo, Cannes,
Berlin, Lisbon, Japan, New Caledonia, San Salvador, Panama,
Transvaal and the usa, and as a gloss on his rich and fulsome
report from Surrey, Rollo Russell compiled a table of 'Previous
analogous glow phenomena, and corresponding eruptions',
gathering together reports of atmospheric phenomena from as
far back as the eruption of Pichincha in 1553, which, according
to the seventeenth-century Danish historian Jens Birkerod, was
the cause of 'remarkable purple after-glow in Denmark, Sweden
and Norway'.¹8 Thus faded the most extraordinary sequence of
