The 1883 blast was heard nearly 5,000 kilometres away
Krakatoa’s caldera sits in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. Explosions on 26–27 August 1883 ranked among history’s fiercest volcanic events, flinging about 25 cubic kilometres of rock and roaring as far as Rodrigues, 4,780 kilometres west.
Volcanologists rate the 1883 climax at VEI 6, with an energy release estimated near 200 megatons of TNT, dwarfing the Hiroshima bomb and topping even the Tsar Bomba test. Dutch East Indies tallies list 165 villages destroyed, 132 badly damaged, and at least 36,417 dead, mostly from tsunamis that followed the collapse. Roughly two-thirds of the island vanished into the new caldera. The sound carried to Alice Springs, some 3,600 kilometres off.
That catastrophe was not the first: a prehistoric caldera collapse had already left Verlaten, Lang, Poolsche Hoed and the base of Rakata, on which the cones of Perboewatan and Danan later grew. Today the group consists of Lang, Verlaten, what is left of Rakata, and Anak Krakatoa, the Child of Krakatoa, which broke the surface of the drowned crater in 1927. Later pulses in 2009–2012 and a major 2018 collapse that drove the Sunda Strait tsunami remade the child’s cone; height reports fell from over 400 metres in 2017 to about 110 metres after that failure before new cinder growth resumed.
It sits among more than 130 active Indonesian volcanoes, more than any other nation has, strung along an arc fed by the Indo-Australian Plate sliding north-east beneath Java and Sumatra.
The name is a puzzle. A late fifteenth-century Old Sundanese text, Bujangga Manik, already mentions an island of Rakata standing as a mountain in the sea. Suggested roots include Sanskrit and Old Javanese words for crab, the call of cockatoos (though those birds live east of the Wallace Line), and the Malay kelakatu, a white-winged ant the old island outline resembled. A folk tale even blames a local answering a captain with slang for I do not know. The Smithsonian treats Krakatau as correct while noting that Krakatoa is widely used.
Source: Krakatoa
