There have been some massive bangs in history. Man-made ones like bombs are deafening for people close to them. But even they are puny when judged against some of the noises created by nature. The loudest of these are almost certainly the eruptions of volcanoes. And the greatest of these in recent times is reckoned to be the eruption of the volcano on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa. Krakatoa used to be an island of twenty-eight square kilometres. It had a volcano that rose to a height of 820 metres. The volcano had been quiet for over two hundred years when it erupted in May 1883. Three months later it erupted again – on 26 August. Then on the following day it blew open with an eruption so violent that the whole island split in two. Two-thirds of it disappeared in a gigantic cloud of dust and rock! This was blown fifty-five kilometres into the air. The sun was blot ted out and an area 280 kilometres across went dark.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a huge wave, or tsunami, towering thirty metres high, rocketed off across the sea, destroying everything in its path. The wave travelled at an estimated 1120 kilo metres per hour. It wiped out over 160 villages and killed more than 36,000 people. Remnants of it even washed up on the shores of Australia and California thousands of kilometres away.
The noise from such a monumental eruption was heard over one-thirteenth of the earth’s surface. People nearly 5000 kilometres away thought they were hearing a naval battle when the blast reached their ears.
The eruption of Krakatoa was well documented, so we know a lot about it. Even so, scientists believe that an eruption in ancient times was five times greater even than that. This was the eruption on the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. It blew a large part of the island to smithereens more than 1600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Picture Credit : Google
