Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World by Gillen D'Arcy Wood Page B
Authors: Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Ads: Link
now open sky. Sleepless and damp in our tents the night before, we had felt rumblings from deep in the earth. Now, we smelled the distinct odor of sulfur in the morning air. Looking down for a moment to recover my senses, I realized I was standing on a sponge-like rock that, but a blink before in geological time, had been adrift among the brewing magma of Tambora’s subterranean chamber.
Figure 0.3. Tambora’s caldera. The morning this photograph was taken (March 3, 2011), the mountain rumbled and the odor of sulfur was palpable. A few weeks later, the volcano began belching ash and smoke. By September that year, Indonesian seismologists had ordered evacuation of the surrounding area. Volcanologists do not expect an imminent eruption, however, on account of the geologically recent 1815 event. (Author photo).
Gazing out across that dizzying crater, I felt no better equipped than pioneer meteorologist Thomas Forster in 1815 to grasp the catastrophic impact of a single mountain’s explosion on the history of the modern world. It was a calm sunrise. The straits of Teluk Saleh to the south came into view over the treetops, its postcard blue waters dotted with islands in the milky sunlight. Stretching behind us, the forests of the Sanggar peninsula appeared at perfect peace. Did an event of world-changing violence truly happen here? Like the shivering audience in that Manchester hall two centuries ago, trying to make sense of Franklin’s ramblings about cold weather and an Iceland volcano, I could hardly believe in Tambora’s global reach.
Figure 0.4. An aerial view of Tambora’s caldera taken from the International Space Station shows its terrific, lunar-like dimensions. (NASA).
It has taken five years of research into the science of volcanism and climate, collaboration with scholars across many disciplines, and much dogged detective work to remake that morning’s ascent of Tambora in my imagination: to articulate, in book-length form, the years-long impact of the massive 1815 eruption on the world in the critical period after the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Forster, I have had the advantage of modern scientific instruments and data through which to “see” the otherwise invisible teleconnections linkingtropical eruptions, climate change, and human affairs. Climbing Tambora, by this route, one could not mistake its greatness.
Tambora belongs to a dense volcanic cluster along the Sunda arc of the Indonesian archipelago. This east-west ridge of volcanoes is a segment, in turn, of the much larger Ring of Fire, a hemisphere-girdling string of volcanic mountains bordering the Pacific Ocean from the southern tip of Chile, to Mount St. Helens in Washington State, to picturesque Mount Fuji in Japan, to Tambora’s near neighbor Krakatau, due to explode into global fame in 1883. Along its almost 40,000 kilometers length, the Ring of Fire boasts lofty, cone-topped volcanoes located exclusively on coastlines and islands. Tambora sits some 330 kilometers north of a tectonic ridge in the trans-Pacific Ring of Fire known as the Java Trench, which marks a curvilinear course south of the islands of Sumbawa and its neighbors Lombok and Sumba.
After perhaps a thousand years’ dormancy, Tambora’s devastating evacuation and collapse in April 1815 required only a few days. It was the concentrated energy of this event that was to have the greatest human impact. By shooting its contents into the stratosphere with such biblical force, Tambora ensured its volcanic gases reached sufficient height to seriously disable the seasonal rhythms of the global climate system, throwing human communities worldwide into chaos. The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years.
A dramatic story unto itself. But a more urgent motivation has driven my history of Tambora. The great
Figure 0.3. Tambora’s caldera. The morning this photograph was taken (March 3, 2011), the mountain rumbled and the odor of sulfur was palpable. A few weeks later, the volcano began belching ash and smoke. By September that year, Indonesian seismologists had ordered evacuation of the surrounding area. Volcanologists do not expect an imminent eruption, however, on account of the geologically recent 1815 event. (Author photo).
Gazing out across that dizzying crater, I felt no better equipped than pioneer meteorologist Thomas Forster in 1815 to grasp the catastrophic impact of a single mountain’s explosion on the history of the modern world. It was a calm sunrise. The straits of Teluk Saleh to the south came into view over the treetops, its postcard blue waters dotted with islands in the milky sunlight. Stretching behind us, the forests of the Sanggar peninsula appeared at perfect peace. Did an event of world-changing violence truly happen here? Like the shivering audience in that Manchester hall two centuries ago, trying to make sense of Franklin’s ramblings about cold weather and an Iceland volcano, I could hardly believe in Tambora’s global reach.
Figure 0.4. An aerial view of Tambora’s caldera taken from the International Space Station shows its terrific, lunar-like dimensions. (NASA).
It has taken five years of research into the science of volcanism and climate, collaboration with scholars across many disciplines, and much dogged detective work to remake that morning’s ascent of Tambora in my imagination: to articulate, in book-length form, the years-long impact of the massive 1815 eruption on the world in the critical period after the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Forster, I have had the advantage of modern scientific instruments and data through which to “see” the otherwise invisible teleconnections linkingtropical eruptions, climate change, and human affairs. Climbing Tambora, by this route, one could not mistake its greatness.
Tambora belongs to a dense volcanic cluster along the Sunda arc of the Indonesian archipelago. This east-west ridge of volcanoes is a segment, in turn, of the much larger Ring of Fire, a hemisphere-girdling string of volcanic mountains bordering the Pacific Ocean from the southern tip of Chile, to Mount St. Helens in Washington State, to picturesque Mount Fuji in Japan, to Tambora’s near neighbor Krakatau, due to explode into global fame in 1883. Along its almost 40,000 kilometers length, the Ring of Fire boasts lofty, cone-topped volcanoes located exclusively on coastlines and islands. Tambora sits some 330 kilometers north of a tectonic ridge in the trans-Pacific Ring of Fire known as the Java Trench, which marks a curvilinear course south of the islands of Sumbawa and its neighbors Lombok and Sumba.
After perhaps a thousand years’ dormancy, Tambora’s devastating evacuation and collapse in April 1815 required only a few days. It was the concentrated energy of this event that was to have the greatest human impact. By shooting its contents into the stratosphere with such biblical force, Tambora ensured its volcanic gases reached sufficient height to seriously disable the seasonal rhythms of the global climate system, throwing human communities worldwide into chaos. The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years.
A dramatic story unto itself. But a more urgent motivation has driven my history of Tambora. The great
Similar Books
