friday, march 07, 2008
Krakatoa - Simon Winchester
“Post literate man’s electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone know about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens. Television gives this quality of simultaneity to events in the global village.”- Marshall McLuhan, foreword to “Explorations in Communication,” 1960
The volcanic explosion that destroyed the island of Krakatoa in 1883 is much more than simply a phenomenally powerful natural disaster – it’s an event that has wormed its way into the collective consciousness.
It’s difficult to put the size of the eruption into proper scale simply because it was so incredibly enormous. The explosion was 13,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Almost the entire 15-square-mile island was simply removed from the face of the earth – almost 900,000 cubic feet of material.
Yet the world first became aware of the happenings with a nineteen-word notice inside the venerable Times of London on May 24, 1883. “Volcanic Eruption. Lloyd’s agent in Batavia, under date of May 23rd, telegraphs: “Strong volcanic eruption, Krakatowa Island, Sundra Straits.”
This little notice was the beginning of a terrible catastrophe that transfixed the world. Three months later, the mountain would explode killing tens of thousands and affecting the whole planet in some way.
Simon Winchester’s book on the disaster, Krakatoa – The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 is an exhaustive account of not just the event but about every ancillary aspect concerning you can conceive of. The book ranges over topics as diverse as the origin of the theory of continental displacement, the history of Dutch overseas colonization, the riddle of Indonesian zoogeography known as The Wallace Line.
Winchester not only painstakingly details all the various elements that converge in the enormous eruption on the little island in the Sundra Strait that morning in 1883 and then exhaustively follows the manifold aftermaths of the cataclysm. One of these is the effect the explosion had on the global consciousness.
- “The communications technology of the time, for example – the advances of telegraphy, the laying of undersea cables, the flourishing of news agencies- ensured that the world’s more advanced peoples learned about the eruption within moments of its happening. But at the same time the limited and only slowly unfolding, geological knowledge then to hand did not give the audience an explanation of the events that was sufficient to sooth their fears about all that they were learning. Hearing of the event baffled people thousands of miles away from where it happened, and left faraway populations bewildered and, in some cases, more than a little frightened.”
Advances in the technology of undersea cables had permitted lines to be laid across the West Indies connecting the region to the wider world in an almost invisible network. And news services were beginning to emerge in order to use this network to relay information to the public – notably London-based agency, Reuters.
The book gives an excellent account of the rise of this news service and how it transformed the happenstance way information was circulated across the globe – with major events often unknown for weeks and months from afar – to a matter of days or hours. It is a process that has only accelerated since that time but isn’t incredibly different from the idea Julius Reuter came up with in 1858.
Yet, while this lattice of information transmission existed, it was somewhat a novelty. The public was learning of things at a greater pace and there was a certain degree of awareness of how extraordinary that actually was but it had not yet galvanized the world as it was capable – it was not until the eruption of Krakatoa that the potential of this means of transmitting information was realized.
- “It was the first-ever story about a truly enormous natural event that was both about the world and was told to the world. Part of the planet’s fabric had been ripped asunder: And part of that same planet, the part connected by cables and telegraphs and with access to newspapers, was now being informed of the event. And the very process of relating the dramatic happenings, especially. In the weeks and months that followed, would enable all who heard, read and understood it to share in the cruel intimacy of the moment.”
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Thus it was that those living relatively distant from the volcano were to feel it’s most deadly fury. Entire towns on the coast of Java and Sumatra were simply washed away by the colossal wall of water and all those living there with it perished with it.
Winchester makes note of a woman killed in Panama when she caught in a massive influx of water into the harbor. The surge was caused by the explosion in Indonesia more than 2,000 miles away – making her death the most distant from the center of the disaster itself.
Yet the constant updates and reports of the disaster were not the only reason the eruption captivated the world. The news reports told the story of an eruption was so vastly powerful that it reached out on it’s own to touch peoples directly lives across the globe.
The most dramatic of this was through sound. It is believed that sound of Krakatoa's eruption is the loudest sound in recorded history. It was heard plainly thousands of miles away.
Winchester tells the story of a police chief of on the tiny island of Rodriquez in the western Indian Ocean made an interesting entry in the log of Sunday, August 26, 1883; “Several times during the night (26th-27th) reports were heard coming from eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”
Rodriguez Island is almost exactly 3,000 miles from Krakatoa and the entry is the furthest verifiable report of the sound from the destruction of the volcano to be heard. It is, as the Victorian author Eugene Murray Aaron noted, the equivalent of a person in Trenton, New Jersey hearing a blast that occurred in San Francisco, California.
“Under the impact of Krakatoa’s explosion, 13 percent of the earth’s surface vibrated audibly,” Winchester writes. “And millions who lived there heard it, and when told what it was were amazed.”
Secondly, the eruption also produced a shockwave which moved at roughly the speed of sound and circled the globe no less than seven times.
While this wasn’t as immediately impressive as hearing the sound of the explosion, it was much vaster in scope. Barographs - meteorological devices that record air pressure – across the globe noted the passing of these massive waves in the air.
Weather experts around the globe were at first puzzled by the odd anomaly in their readings and then stunned when they discovered the cause. The impact was to bring the far-away disaster immediately into the awareness of people living across the globe.
Four months after the explosion a paper on this phenomena was presented to the Royal Society and caused an immediate sensation.
“Here was one of the first provable instance in which a natural even occurring in one corner of the planet had effects that spread over the entire world,” Winchester writes. Few in Victorian times had begun to think truly globally – even though exploration was proceeding apace… Krakatoa, however, began to change all that.”
The change has continued unabated for the last 125 years culminating in the hyper-fast exchange of information and news we have today. Twenty-four hour news channels and to the nanosecond information updates via the internet make our connectiveness even more closer than anyone could have dreamed in the 19th century.
Yet, in another way, this connectiveness also dampens the power of news to startle and affect us in deep and meaningful ways. The availability to learn of catastrophes across the world each day minimizes them in our mind. No matter how devastating, they are forgotten in a seven-day and replaced with another creating tragedy somewhere else.
A good example is the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. This eruption was the second most powerful during the last century (although still about half the power of Krakatoa) and directly affected millions. But it’s almost unknown today.
Pinatubo erupted in a relatively populated area of the Phillipines and an estimated 2.1 million people were affected by the eruption. Still, only about 300 people were killed by the eruption - most when the roofs of their homes collapsed under the weight of wet ash.
It a terrible way the constant influx of information about misery in our world has somewhat numbed us. Our compassion has been transformed to commiseration at best.
Perhaps, the volcano has more lessons to teach us. It certainly is working on another performance. In 1927 a new island has emerged from the remains of the old one. The ongoing volcanic activity created Anak Krakatau or “child of Krakatoa” and by 1930 it was established as a permanent island in the straight. Since the 1950s, the island has grown at an average rate of five inches a week.
And it remains very active. In October and November of last year, the young volcano began a series of eruptions that prompted authorities to warn people to stay away from the island.
While the possibility of a Krakatoa-level explosion in the immediate future is very slim, the rumblings of the volcano underscore the fact it will one day roar to life in the manner of its famed predecessor.
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