Transcript Slide 1

By Aaron Johnson
Have you heard of the legendary Krakatau?
--About how in 1883 it emitted the most violent
eruption in all recorded history? Most people
haven’t. But you shall learn. I shall tell you the
story of Krakatau.
To officially begin the story of Krakatau, you must
know where it is. The volcano Krakatau is located at
approximately 16.7 degrees south and 105.4 degrees
east. It is found in the Sunda Strait, Indonesia, a
country made up of over 17,000 islands, many of
them volcanic. Krakatau itself is a volcanic island.
Krakatau
There are three main theories about the origin of the
name Krakatau.
1. It comes from the Sanskrit word “karkata,” which
means crab or lobster
2.
It mimics the noise of white parrots that once lived
in the area
3.
It’s the product of a linguistic error. A ship’s captain
asked a native about his whereabouts, and the
native responded “kaga-tau” in Betawinese, which
is slang for “I don’t know”
If you wanted to climb to the top of Krakatau, you
had better have a lot of time on your hands,
because Krakatau is about 2667 feet tall. That’s
equal to 297 school busses stacked on top of
each other.
Krakatau was formed by the subduction of the IndianAustralian plate under the Eurasian Plate. Before the
great explosion in 1883, Krakatau was made up of
three cinder cone volcanoes and a caldera. After
1883, only 1/3 of the volcano and a few small islands
remained above sea level. One island, Anak
Krakatau, or Krakatau’s Child, is an extremely active
young volcano.
Anak Krakatau
There are three different types of volcano: composite,
shield, and cinder cone. Krakatau is a composite
volcano. A composite volcano is usually over ten
miles across and ten thousand or more feet high.
They have moderately steep sides and sometimes
small craters in their sides. They are called composite
volcanoes because they are composed of many layers
of lava.
Lava layers
126 years ago, August 26-27, 1883. This was the date of
the most violent eruption in all recorded history, the
eruption of Krakatau. The explosion, whose dust
affected world-wide weather for years, had the
equivalent power of 200 megatons of TNT and had
four times the nuclear yield of the Tsar bomb, the
largest nuclear device ever detonated. Krakatau
ejected rock, ash and pumice to an extent of about 21
cubic kilometers away, and the explosion was so
loud it was heard all the way in Australia. At least
36,417 people lost their lives to this eruption and the
120-foot tsunamis it created.
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Krakatau