Volcano Tambora. Eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:46

Two hundred years ago, a grandiose natural event took place on earth - the eruption of the Tambora volcano, which affected the climate of the entire planet and claimed tens of thousands of human lives.

Geographic location of the volcano

Volcano Tambora is located in the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, on the Sangar Peninsula. It should be immediately clarified that Tambora is not the largest volcano in that region, there are about 400 volcanoes in Indonesia, and the largest of them, Kerinchi, rises in Sumatra.

The Sangar Peninsula itself is 36 km wide and 86 km long. The height of the Tambora volcano itself reached 4300 meters by April 1815, the eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 led to a reduction in its height to the current 2700 meters.

Start of eruption

After three years of ever-increasing activity, the Tambora volcano finally woke up on April 5, 1815, when the first eruption occurred, which lasted 33 hours. The explosion of the Tambora volcano gave rise to a column of smoke and ash, which rose to a height of about 33 km. However, the nearby population did not leave their homes,despite the volcano, in Indonesia, as already mentioned, volcanic activity was not unusual.

It is noteworthy that those people who were far away were more frightened at first. The thunder of the volcano explosion was heard on the island of Java in the densely populated city of Yogyakarta. The inhabitants thought that they heard the thunder of cannons. In this regard, the troops were put on alert, and ships began to cruise along the coast in search of a ship in trouble. However, the ash that appeared the next day suggested the true cause of the sound of explosions heard.

Volcano Tambora remained somewhat calm for several more days until April 10th. The fact is that this eruption did not lead to the outflow of lava, it froze in the vent, contributing to the build-up of pressure and provoking a new, even more terrible eruption, which happened.

April 10 at about 10 am a new eruption occurred, this time a column of ash and smoke rose to a height of about 44 km. The thunder from the explosion had already been heard on the island of Sumatra. At the same time, the place of the eruption (Volcano Tambora) on the map relative to Sumatra is located very far, at a distance of 2,500 km.

According to eyewitnesses, by seven in the evening of the same day, the intensity of the eruption increased even more, and by eight in the evening a hail of stones with a diameter of 20 cm fell on the island, followed by ash again. By ten in the evening, three fiery columns rising into the sky above the volcano merged into one, and the Tambora volcano turned into a mass of “liquid fire”. About seven rivers of red-hot lava began to spreadin all directions around the volcano, destroying the entire population of the Sangar Peninsula. Even in the sea, lava spread 40 km from the island, and a characteristic smell could be felt even in Batavia (the old name of the capital of Jakarta), located at a distance of 1300 km.

End of eruption

Two more days later, on April 12, the Tambora volcano was still active. Ash clouds have already spread to the western coast of Java and the south of the island of Sulawesi, which is 900 km from the volcano. According to residents, it was impossible to see the dawn until 10 am, even the birds did not start singing until almost noon. The eruption ended only by April 15, and the ash did not settle until April 17. The crater of the volcano formed after the eruption reached 6 km in diameter and 600 meters in depth.

Victims of the volcano Tambora

It is estimated that about 11 thousand people died on the island during the eruption, but the number of victims was not limited to this. Later, as a result of famine and epidemics on the island of Sumbawa and the neighboring island of Lombok, about 50 thousand people died, and the cause of death was the tsunami that rose after the eruption, whose effect spread hundreds of kilometers around.

Physics of catastrophe consequences

When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, an amount of 800 megatons of energy was released, comparable to the explosion of 50,000 atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima. This eruption was eight times stronger than the well-known eruption of Vesuvius and four times more powerful than what happened later.volcanic eruption Krakatau.

The eruption of Tambora Volcano lifted 160 cubic kilometers of solid matter into the air, the thickness of the ash on the island reached 3 meters. The sailors who set sail at that time, for several more years, met on their way islands of pumice, reaching five kilometers in size.

Incredible volumes of ash and sulfur-containing gases reached the stratosphere, rising to a height of more than 40 km. The ash covered the sun from all life, located at a distance of 600 km around the volcano. And around the world, there was orange haze and blood red sunsets.

A year without summer

Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide released during the eruption reached Ecuador in the same 1815, and the very next year caused climate change in Europe, this phenomenon was then called the “year without summer.”

In many countries of Europe then brown and even reddish snow fell, in the summer in the Swiss Alps there was snow almost every week, and the average temperature in Europe was lower by 2-4 degrees. The same decrease in temperature was observed in America.

Across the world, poor harvests have led to higher food prices and a famine that, along with epidemics, has claimed 200,000 lives.

Comparative characteristics of the eruption

The eruption that befell the Tambora volcano (1815) was unique in the history of mankind, it was assigned the seventh category (out of eight possible) on the scale of volcanic danger. Scientists were able to determine that in the last 10 thousand years there have been foursimilar eruptions. Before the Tambora volcano, a similar catastrophe happened in 1257 on the neighboring island of Lombok, on the site of the vent of the volcano there is now Segara Anak lake with an area of 11 square kilometers (pictured).

First visit to the volcano since the eruption

The first traveler to descend on the island to visit the frozen volcano Tambora was the Swiss botanist Heinrich Zollinger, who led a team of researchers to study the ecosystem created as a result of a natural cataclysm. It happened in 1847, a full 32 years after the eruption. Nevertheless, smoke still continued to rise from the crater, and explorers moving along the frozen crust fell into the still hot volcanic ash when it broke.

But scientists have already noted the emergence of new life on the incinerated earth, where in some places the foliage of plants has already begun to turn green. And even at an altitude of more than 2 thousand meters, thickets of casuarina (a coniferous plant resembling ivy) were found.

As further observation showed, by 1896, 56 species of birds lived on the slopes of the volcano, while one of them (Lophozosterops dohertyi) was first discovered there.

The impact of the eruption on art and science

Art historians hypothesize that it was the unusually gloomy manifestations in nature caused by the eruption of an Indonesian volcano that inspired the creation of the famous landscapes by the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. His paintings are often decorated with gloomy, graylanguid sunsets.

But the most famous was the creation of Mary Shelley "Frankenstein", which was conceived precisely in the summer of 1816, when she, while still the bride of Percy Shelley, along with her fiancé and the famous Lord Byron, were visiting on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was bad weather and incessant rains that inspired Byron's idea, and he invited each of the companions to come up with and tell a terrible story. Mary came up with the story of Frankenstein, which formed the basis of her book, written two years later.

Lord Byron himself also, under the influence of the situation, wrote the famous poem “Darkness”, which was translated by Lermontov, here are the lines from it: “I had a dream that was not quite a dream. The brilliant sun went out … The whole work was saturated with that hopelessness that prevailed over nature that year.

The chain of inspirations did not stop there, the poem "Darkness" was read by Byron's doctor John Polidori, who, under her impression, wrote his short story "Vampire".

The famous Christmas hymn "Silent Night" (Stille Nacht) was written to the poems of the German priest Josef Mohr, which he composed in the same rainy year of 1816 and which opened a new romantic genre.

Surprisingly, a poor harvest and high barley prices inspired Karl Drez, a German inventor, to build a vehicle that could replace the horse. So he invented the prototype of the modern bicycle, and it was the name Drez that entered our everyday life with the word "trolley".