Krakatoa

The historian and philosopher Will Durant, author of the massive 11-volume The Story of Civilization, once wrote, "Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice."  That is indeed the theme (and conclusion) of three books that I recently finished.  The first book was Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester.  I've now read three of Winchester's books (including The Atlantic and The Pacific), and I've thoroughly enjoyed each one.  Here, Winchester writes about the eruption of the volcano known as Krakatoa, an archipelago located in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra.  Krakatoa erupted from May 20-October 21, 1883, with peak activity on August 27, 1883.  Nearly 70% of the island and surrounding archipelago were destroyed and collapsed into a caldera.  It was one of the deadliest and most destructive eruptions in recorded history, and Winchester describes in great detail the eruption's global and historical impact.

Krakatoa's eruption was heard almost 3,000 miles by scientists on the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.  The accompanying pressure (blast) wave circled the world at least 7 times.  Massive tsunamis that occurred in the aftermath caused most of the 36,000 deaths.  There were multiple reports of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of pumice stone hundreds of miles away from the eruption, some of which washed up on the shores of the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption.  

The eruption itself caused a volcanic winter as temperatures dropped by an average of 0.4 °C in the northern hemisphere.  Global weather patterns changed, with some areas reporting record rainfalls and widespread flooding, while other areas experienced severe drought.  The ash darkened the skies and changed the character of the setting sun as far away as the United States.  British artist William Ascroft apparently made thousands of colored sketches of the brilliant sunsets, and the artist Edvard Munch is said to have been inspired to paint his famous The Scream as a result:

The second book, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History by William and Nicholas Klingaman, tells the story of the now famous "Year Without a Summer", predominantly due to a volcanic winter event following the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.  Based upon the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) (a measure of intensity of explosiveness of volcanic eruptions, similar to the Richter Scale for earthquakes), the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 (VEI 7) was more powerful than even the Krakatoa eruption (VEI 6) above.  Similar to Krakatoa, the Mount Tambora eruption significantly disrupted normal weather patterns on a global basis, resulting in extreme weather and harvest failures around the world.  In their book, the Klingamans suggest that the Mount Tambora eruption and the subsequent "Year Without a Summer" served as inspiration for paintings by J.M.W. Turner, as well as the classic novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori, Lord Byron, and friends were spending the summer near Lake Geneva, Switzerland in June 1816.  Due to the constant rain, the group of friends spent most of their time indoors, and as the story goes, inspired by a collection of German ghost stories, Lord Byron proposed a contest to see who could write the scariest story.  Mary Shelly apparently won that contest, though Lord Byron wrote a vampire story that Polidori later used as inspiration for his story, The Vampyre, which served as an early precursor for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.

The last book was Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World by the journalist David Keys (also discussed in the first two episodes of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead).  I thought Keys overreached here, but he tries to link several major sociopolitical events with a cataclysmic event that occurred around A.D. 535, possibly due to a volcanic winter caused by earlier eruption at Krakatoa.  The dramatic change in weather patterns led to harvest failures and extreme weather (flooding in some areas of the world, drought in others), which when accompanied by the Plague, resulted in fall of some ancient civilizations and the rise of others (particularly the rise of Islam).  He concludes, "Climate has the potential to change history - not just on a short-term basis but in the long term as well."  It's an interesting theory, if not exactly backed up by solid evidence.

By far the best book of the three was Winchester's.  Regardless, I learned a lot from all three books.  As I reflected on these three books, I think that the lessons for us today are fairly clear.  First, as I've talked about a lot in several posts this past year, we are all tied closely together.  Events that happen in one part of the world can and frequently do have an impact on the opposite end of the world (I am reminded once again of the "butterfly effect").  Second, it's hard to reliably predict the downstream consequences of an event that occurs in the VUCA world of today.  Lastly, I go back to the original quote from Will Durant at the beginning of this post (I will paraphrase slightly).  Civilization does exist by geologic consent, and we would do well to remember that, particularly as we deal with the change in climate today.