We are presently keeping an eye on the Indonesian volcano because tectonic activity seems to have increased around the pacific’s Ring of Fire. The present volcano is located on the same active area that produced Tambora and Krakatoa that killed hundreds of thousands of people and had devastating effects on the world’s weather. Similarly incresed erathquake activity has led to Fukushima and the 2004 tsunami. Attached is an OPED piece I wrote for the Boston Globe about the Merapi explosion. The concerns are the same about the present volcano in Indonesia:
The Merapi Volcano;
Why We Should Be Very Worried.
The Merapi volcano, presently exploding more forcefully every day on Indonesia is located on the Sundra Arc, one of our planet’s most complex and dangerous geological areas. This is where two large plates of the earth’s crust, the Australian and Indian plates, are rapidly plunging down below the mini Burma plate to create the world’s deepest and most powerful earthquakes and the world’s largest and most dangerous volcanoes. The world’s three most deadly tectonic events in recorded history all occurred in this arc of volcanic islands that include Sumatra and Java.
Tambora, the largest volcano ever recorded in human history erupted in 1815. Records were not very good at the time, but at least 100,000 people died in the supervolcano. The eruption wafted thousands of tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which coalesced with raindrops to form a veil of sulphuric acid that reflected sunlight back into space leading the following year to “The Year Without a Summer.”
New England experienced freezing temperatures during every summer month in 1816, and crop failures in Europe exacerbated social problems already created by the rape of the countryside during the Napoleonic wars and the thousands of unemployed soldiers discharged at the conclusion of those hostilities. The crop failures were responsible for an additional 100,000 deaths. The veil of sulphuric acid also caused the atmospheric sunsets so favored by the maritime painter William Turner. But the weather was so atrocious in the summer of 1816 that Mary Shelley and her husband holed up on the shores of Lake Geneva where she wrote her creepy classic, Frankenstein.
In 1831, the world’s second largest recorded volcano, blew 4 cubic miles of material off the top of Krakatoa Mountain and into the Indian Ocean where they created a 150 foot high Tsunami that killed 34,000 people. This disaster was more fully recorded because the telegraph had just been invented. Of course we still remember the Boxing Day Tsunami that occurred the day after Christmas in 2004. It killed 150,000 people and left millions more homeless.
The present cycle of tectonic activity probably started right around that time in 2004 when the Indian plate thrust rapidly below the Burma plate initiating one of the deepest and most powerful earthquake ever recorded. The Indian plate then plunged deeper into the earth’s interior where it melted and started to rise through several miles of sediment as magma.
The magma emerging out of Merapi is not liquid lava like what we are used to seeing flowing out of Hawaiian volcanoes. This material is more like half hot melted rock that is being extruded out of the volcano like toothpaste being squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. But the magma also contains gases under pressure that are causing the eruptions, rockfalls of flaming hot boulders, and pyroclastic flows; shock waves of heated gas and ash that on November 5th engulfed an entire village in a “safe” area nine miles from the base of the volcano.
These pyroclastic flows of ash and hot gas are what seared peoples’ lungs on Pompeii. They can also travel unseen across half a mile of water to incinerate ships at sea as they did when Mount Pelee erupted off the island of Martinique in 1902.
But Merapi is not the only volcano now active on the Sundra Arc. Within the past few weeks there have been many more deep earthquakes and twenty other volcanoes, including the remains of Krakatoa, that have also become active. Now some scientists fear that something far more catastrophic may be brewing beneath the Sundra Arc. Indonesia is also home to the Lake Toba supervolcano, believed to be the largest explosive eruption to have occurred on our planet during the past 25 million years.
The Toba supervolcano occurred between 67,500 and 75,500 years ago. The eruption is believed to have only lasted about two weeks but it ejected 670 cubic miles of material into the air and covered all of Southeast Asia under 6 inches of ash. Parts of India and Malaysia still lie under the remains of more than twenty feet of ash from the eruption. Toba also ejected 100,000 metric tons of sulphuric acid that cooled the Northern latitudes of the earth by up to 15 degrees Centigrade. Almost no plants and animals survived the volcanic winter in South East Asia and the world’s human population was reduced by 60%. Humanity passed through a genetic bottleneck because of the catastrophe that is still evident in our DNA today.
The conditions that caused the Toba supervolcano were the three tectonic plates rapidly crashing into each other at the Sundra Arc 67,500 years ago. What concerns scientists now is that as far as we know, conditions could be exactly the same as they were then as they are now. If that is the case we should not be worried about the effects of the volcano on aviation, as we were after last summer’s Icelandic volcano, but we should be very worried about the effects of Tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and ash clouds and a volcanic winter on humanity and the world’s climate.
—–
William Sargent is a NOVA consultant and award-winning author of over a dozen books about science and the environment. His most recent books are “Sea Level Rise; The Chatham Story” and “The Well From Hell,” about the BP spill. His books are available locally and at a discount to Coastlines supporters.
coastlinesproject 
Leave a comment