THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 7

Figure 1.4. Timeline of Tambora's eruption, based on eyewitness accounts and subsequent geological ana-
lysis of the site. (Adapted from Stephen Self et al., “Volcanological Study of the Great Tambora Eruption
of 1815,” Geology 12 [November 1984]: 660).
For years after 1815, ships encountered vast islands of pumice stone as far away as the Indian
Ocean, thousands of kilometers to the west. These great pumice pontoons were littered with
burnt slivers of trees, the carbonized residue of Sumbawa's once dense and valuable forests.
During the eruption, on Borneo to the north, where the earth shook amid a great roar, the
indigenous people believed the sky was falling, while on the eastern coast of Java, the birds
kept a stunned silence until 11:00 the next morning. Visibility shrank to a few feet, so thick
was the fallout. Driven west by the beginning monsoon, Tambora's ash cloud consumed Sum-
bawa and Lombok before descending on Bali, covering the island in ash a half-meter deep. 18
The same gigantic cloud “dreary and terrific”—Tambora's pyroclastic plumes drifting west-
ward—could then be seen approaching the Javan shore from the direction of Bali, and the
air grew very cold. 19 Across a 600-kilometer radius, darkness descended for two days, while
Tambora's ash cloud expanded to cover a region nearly the size of the continental United
States. The entire Southeast Asian region was blanketed in volcanic debris for a week. Day
after dark day, British officials conducted business by candlelight, as the death toll mounted.
When a semblance of sunlight returned at last sometime on April 13, the scattered bands
of survivors on the Sanggar peninsula found themselves in an unrecognizable, barren land-
scape. In every direction, ash meters thick had buried their island home as they had known
it. On the western slope of the mountain, where the kingdom of “Tambora” itself was sub-
merged, an entire ethnic group disappeared, and with it their language, the easternmost
Austro-Asiatic tongue. On nearby islands, conditions were almost as dire. Reports later sur-
faced of starvation and rat plagues on Lombok, while thousands of Balinese attempted to sell
themselves or their children for handfuls of rice. 20
Figure 1.5. Map showing the density of ashfall issuing from Tambora's phoenix clouds (the plinian explo-
sion, because vertical, produced ashfall across a smaller area). Prevailing trade winds drove the ash clouds
north and west as far as Celebes (Sulawesi) and Borneo, 1,300 kilometers away. The explosions on April
10, 1815, could be heard twice as far away. (Adapted from Stephen Self et al., “Volcanological Study of
the Great Tambora Eruption of 1815,” Geology 12 [November 1984]: 661).