United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"As the summer of 1883 advanced the vigor of Krakatoa, which had sprung into notoriety at the beginning of the year, steadily increased and the noises became more and more vehement; these were presently audible on shores ten miles distant, and then twenty miles distant; and still those noises waxed louder and louder, until the great thunders of the volcano, now so rapidly developing, astonished the inhabitants that dwelt over an area at least as large as Great Britain.
Not alone was the eruption of Krakatoa alarming in its more ordinary manifestations, but it was unparalleled both in the vehemence of the shock and in the distance to which the effects of the great eruption were propagated.
Then I'll come back here by the first craft that offers arter which. Ay! Ay! shove her in here. Plenty o' water." The last remark was made to the seaman who steered the boat sent from the vessel in the offing. A short time thereafter Captain Roy was sailing away for Batavia, while his son, with Van der Kemp, Moses, Winnie, and Spinkie, was making for Krakatoa in a native boat.
It was found that Krakatoa and all the adjoining islands were covered with a fine white dust, like snow, and that the trees on the northern part of the former island and Varlaten had been to a great extent deprived of their leaves and branches by falling pumice, while those on Lang Island and Polish Hat, as well as those on the Peak of Rakata, had to a great extent escaped no doubt owing to the prevailing direction of the wind.
The concussion of the air reached to an unprecedented distance and the clouds of floating dust encircled the earth, producing striking phenomena of which an account is given at the end of this chapter. The rapidity with which the effects of the Krakatoa eruption made themselves evident in all parts of the earth is perhaps the most remarkable outcome of this extraordinary event.
From their accounts it was ascertained that in the direction of Krakatoa the heavens were clouded with ashes, and that a grand column of smoke, illumined from time to time by flashes of flame, arose from above the island.
The sounds seem to me more like the mutterings of a volcano. Some new crater may have burst forth in the Sumatran ranges. This thick darkness inclines me to think so especially after the new activity of volcanic action we have seen so recently at Krakatoa. Let me try your matches, Nigel, perhaps they have escaped mine are useless." But Nigel's matches were as wet as those of the hermit.
Thus the progress of the great dust-cloud was traced out by the extraordinary sky effects it produced, and from the progress of the dust-cloud we inferred the movements of the invisible air current which carried it along. Nor need it be thought that the quantity of material projected from Krakatoa should have been inadequate to produce effects of this world-wide description.
The eruption of Krakatoa seems to have been due to some deep-lying causes of extraordinary violence, this appearing not only in the terrible explosion which tore the island to fragments and sent its remnants as floating dust many miles high into the air, but also from an internal convulsion that affected many of the volcanoes of Java, which almost simultaneously broke into violent eruption.
Other volcanoes, it is said by those who have a right to speak in regard to such matters, have ejected more "stuff," but not one has equalled Krakatoa in the intensity of its explosions, the appalling results of the sea-waves, the wonderful effects in the sky, and the almost miraculous nature of the sounds.
Word Of The Day