Everyone has heard of the eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna. Some people know about the strongest eruptions of the Mont Pele volcanoes on the island of Martinique and Krakatoa in Indonesia. However, the largest volcanologists recognize the eruption of the Tambora volcano on the little-known small island of Sumbawa near Java.
LONG-LONG NIGHT
Once, at the very beginning of April 1815, one of the inhabitants of a small Indonesian village on the island of Sumbawa fell ill and went to the famous healer in Banjarmasin, on the island of Kalimantan, in the hope of being healed. The clairvoyant cured the sick person and in the end said that he would never be able to return to his native village. Then the peasant did not understand what the words of the seer meant. It soon became clear that the medicine man was absolutely right. Just a day later, the Tamboro volcano, located on Sumbawa, woke up.
It happened on April 5, 1815. In the evening, the first weak explosion was heard on an island near the volcano. At first, the Governor of Java, Sir Stamford Raffle, thought that the explosion had occurred on a shipwrecked. However, the captains of the rescue ships sent to help could not find either the shipwrecked people or the vessel.
The next day, April 6, the explosions were repeated, and then a column of steam and red-hot ash flew out of the throat of the awakened Tamboro. The ash cloud was blown away by the wind to the foothills. There, falling to the ground, the ashes covered the local vineyards and meadows. Following the cloud, a terrifying pillar of lava erupted from the volcanic vent. A few minutes later, huge, red-hot boulders flew down to the foot of the mountain. That stone rain washed away all the villages in Sumbawa from the face of the earth. In the period from 6 to 10 April, explosions and emissions of ash and hot stones increased noticeably. The surviving residents of Sumbawa later described the events as follows: “On the evening of April 10, three highly visible pillars of fire shot up near the summit of Mount Tamborough. Each of them rose to a very great height, and then their tops merged in the air into a seething mass. In a short time, the mountain turned into a cone of liquid fire, stretching in all directions … Stones fell like a hail, some of them were as big as two fists, but mostly no larger than a walnut.
A few hours later, a terrible hurricane rose over the territory of the island, easily lifting the houses of the village of Sagar into the air, which was located 40 kilometers from Mount Tamborough. In the area of the volcanic eruption, the hurricane was even stronger. Very soon, nothing alive remained on the territory of the foothills: neither man, nor animal, nor plant. Simultaneously with the vortex, tsunami waves up to nine meters high were formed on the ocean surface. With terrible force, they fell on the islands lying near Sumbawa, and carried thousands of people, their homes and livestock into the ocean.
Meanwhile, the explosions in the area of Mount Tamborough continued. The result of one of them - the most powerful - was the offensive in the whole area of a long, impenetrable night. This natural phenomenon was caused by the fact that after the explosion, the top of the mountain split into several fragments that fell on the slopes of Tamborough, raising a huge cloud of dust and ash. This cloud hid the sun. The vast darkness covered the land for three days, horrifying millions of people in an area equal to France.
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The eruption of a volcano on the island of Sumbawa lasted three long months.
200,000 ATOMIC BOMBS
When the raging elements calmed down for a while on April 18, Governor Raffle decided to send ships with provisions to the neighboring islands of Sumbawa. What the captain of the rescue ship Owel Phillips saw was beyond words. A picture of terrible devastation appeared before his eyes. The mountain, once proudly towering over the lowlands, was wiped off the face of the earth. If initially its height was almost four thousand meters, then after the eruption it decreased by almost one and a half thousand. The layer of dust and ash in the foothill areas reached 50-60 centimeters. It covered the territory not only of Sumbawa, but also of the neighboring islands. The island states of Pecat, Sangar, Temboro and most of Dompo and Bima, located near the volcano, were covered with a meter layer of ash,under the weight of which, even a hundred kilometers from Tamborough, dwellings and other buildings were destroyed. Volcanic bombs with a diameter of up to thirteen meters scattered over a distance of more than forty kilometers.
The famous French and Belgian volcanologist Garun Taziev writes in his book "Encounters with the Devil": "If all this mass fell on Paris, a" grave mound "more than a thousand meters high would form over the city."
In place of the disappeared summit of the Tamborough volcano, a giant caldera was formed - a depression with a diameter of seven kilometers and a depth of about seven hundred meters. More than one Eiffel Tower could be successfully lowered into such a funnel. At the caldera formation, the most conservative estimates have displaced 150 cubic kilometers of rock. This "failure" gave rise to a gigantic tsunami wave in the Bay of Bima, which destroyed many buildings, uprooted trees and threw large ships on the roadstead far ashore.
The Tamboro eruption shook the entire Indonesian archipelago. On the island of Borneo, 750 kilometers away from Tamboro, so much ash fell that local residents even after that began to reckon as "a year of great ash fall". The energy released during the eruption was equivalent to the explosion of 200,000 atomic bombs. 92 thousand people became victims of this terrible cataclysm. In settlements located in the immediate vicinity of the volcano, only 29 residents survived. Many of those who managed to escape suffered from hunger and thirst after the disaster. The resulting famine and epidemics killed another 48,000 people on Sumbawa Island and 44,000 on Lambok Island. About 5,000 died in Bali.
WINTER SUMMER
The energy released by the volcanic eruption was not limited to the hurricane and tsunami. The consequence of this large-scale disaster was the so-called year without summer. In London, it was only two or three degrees colder than usual, but residents of the American state of Connecticut in July took out of their dressers and put on warm winter coats and hats. On July 10, the streets of the villages were so cold that the hanging linen instantly froze. As a result, the harvest did not ripen in large areas of the United States in 1815. In France, too, a low level of yield was noted: the ears of wheat did not have time to ripen. There was famine in the country, there was not enough bread and cereals. Famine also raged in Ireland and Wales.
Meteorological scientists could not understand the cause of the July frosts in Western Europe and North America. Some of them said that the change in weather is associated with flares occurring on the Sun, while others argued the relationship of the onset of cold weather in the middle of summer with the accumulation of icebergs in the northern regions of the Atlantic Ocean. But they both turned out to be wrong. Later, in the second half of the 19th century, a group of scientists dealing with the problems of earthquake-prone zones and the description of the nature of volcanoes, expressed an almost obvious assumption for our time that the change in weather and the onset of frosts in the summer period in 1815 could only be associated with the eruption of Tamborough volcano on Sumbawa.
However, this version was not news to the world scientific community even then. Back in 1784, Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790), a natural scientist, philosopher and major US statesman, proved the connection between the extremely cold winter and dry fog that formed as a result of the eruption of several volcanoes on the Japanese islands and the Icelandic island of Laki. But in 1815, no scientist had yet taken Franklin's view of weather change seriously. Moreover, many of them claimed that the reason for the incredible weather phenomenon lies precisely in the lightning rods built by Benjamin Franklin everywhere. Scientists argued that it was these devices that diverted the warm streams of electricity from the depths of the earth, due to which a sharp change in air temperature occurred. Although now this point of view looks like a complete curiosity.
Victor BUMAGIN