Doomed to Fail - Ep 51: Volcanoes Pt 4 - Krakatoa: Exploring the Tectonic Plates Beneath the Cataclysmic Eruption

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Today, we are geologists! Join us for Volcanoes Part 4 - Krakatoa! Krakatoa was the first global disaster where the globe knew what was happening - erupting in 1883, telegraphs and undersea cables brought the news to the entire planet faster than previously imagined possible. Thousands died in the pumice, the fires, and most of all, the Tsunamis that ravaged the islands while the world waited for news in horror.But does that make us geologists? No, but this does! -- We also learn that we didn't know about Tectonic Plates until 1965!!!! Which is insane since that's the first thing you learn in Earth Science.  More on Continental Drift, etc. in the episode!Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883Geologist who was killed in Burkina Faso died while working job 'he loved': son | CBC NewsContinental Drift versus Plate TectonicsHow Earth’s cooling molten core could destroy the planet - BBC Science Focus MagazineInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do. And we're recording. It's not reporting on progress. So we're doing it. I see. Cool.

Hi, Taylor. How are you? Good. I was telling you, just like, doing, working on stuff. But one thing that we did this today is Juan pulled up a bunch of weeds in the yard. And I've also had the work. allergies of my whole entire life. So I've had a lot of allergy pill. I'm like, so it's a little cloudy in here. It's very, very stuffed in like here, this area under my nose hurts. Did not knock you

out when you get those pills? No, you know what? I need, I need to talk to a doctor of Elverpute because like I desperately want to sleep on airplanes. I can take like three allergy pills and three three drama means and not fall asleep. Are you nervous fire? Yeah, but like I can't my body just take a bunch of drugs and fall asleep. That would be nice. That'd be nice. I can't sleep on planes because I'm really big. I'm always afraid that I'm going to like kind of fart.

One time I was flying to to bail and I was on a plane and I fell asleep and I woke myself up by farting really loudly on the plane. And I was like, oh my God, every look at me. I was like, just never do this again. I'm sure that happens all the time. I don't know how anyone, I mean, I'm 5'3 or how anyone an inch taller than me is that goes on an airplane because I'm super uncomfortable. And I know people who are much taller than me, who fly, one of my friends at work, he's like six, four, and he flew the other day in the middle seat. And I'm like, oh, my God. That's fucking terrible.

Exit, bro. Always the exit, bro. That's the rule. Cool. Well, we can go ahead and kick things off. Welcome to Doom to Fail. Our True Prime slash History Podcasts about things slash relationships are we're doomed to fail. I'm Farr's joined by Taylor.

And I think today is Taylor's term. to go first. Yes. It is Taylor's turn. Okay. So I'll tell you my drink, and then we'll segue away over to you. Okay. I'm going to drink a big little glass of milk.

Gross. You'll understand why in the next episode. No, no, good for you. That's gross. I used to drink milk. I was a kid, but I don't know. I can't imagine these days. Cool.

Well, great. Mine is whiskey. on the rocks and the important part of that is rocks because guess what i'm a geologist now from all the reading that i did this week is that exciting is that touching on volcanologist or is it it is i learned a lot about geology this week sweet because we're talking about a volcano yeah um and i was also thinking like why didn't i study science in school because then i'm like this is all so cool. Like I'm just like learning all this stuff. This is awesome. And then actually I know someone who is a geologist and they went to a wedding with their partner and their partner was like

I don't know. Something was so off about her. I was like talking to other people and I was like, is she okay? Did she like recently escape from a cult? Like what is going on? Like super weird. And my husband was like, she's just a geologist. And I was like, okay, that explained it for me. I did science. I was a biology major for maybe a semester in college before I realized like it stops being cool and interesting and fun like real quick. Once you started getting into the nitty gritty of like the chemistry of things and like the deep science of it. Well, that's that was actually part of my question. Because like at what point when you study science do people start asking you questions? You know, no? Like I never got far enough. Yeah. I feel like that turning. point is when you like become a scientist you know could be or when you do peer review papers i think one of the two yeah oh that's true when you're like in phd school yeah that makes sense um

so i was like okay maybe people are getting sick of volcanoes because this is number four of the seven part series so we're like over the crescendo of the of the volcano talk um but then i was reading this book called krakatoa the day the world exploded and i said wow like 15 times in the while i was reading it so i'm super interested i think it's still got some cool stuff that we can learn together so we're talking about crackatoa which erupted on august 27th 1883 that's my birthday cool hey my event's on august 27th too wait what year's yours 1883 mine's 1883 mine's august 27th 1883 is not august 27th 1883 is it a volcano no but the events that's when that happened that's so weird i don't believe you okay i'll tell you

my story later then okay okay okay so when we talked about toba the one that's the first one that erupted 70 000 years ago um i learned we learned a lot about human evolution remember different stages of ban we all came from those like 10 000 breeding pairs all those things And just like we talked about human evolution then, this time we're talking about geology and the study of geology and rocks in the earth. And some of our old friends pop up in the story as well that we've talked about in the past, which is super delightful. So we'll talk to get to that. So reminder that there's levels of eruption. There's a volcanic explosivity index.

And each number up is double the one below it. And so this one actually fills our lists. We've hit one at 5, 6, 7, and 8. So all of them are different levels of plenion, which you also learn. So there's like ultraplenian, plenian, those kind of overlap with the numbers. But each number also has another fun adjective with it. So number five is a cataclysmic eruption. That was a Vesuvius.

Number six is a colossal eruption. that's crackatoa we'll talk about today number seven is a super colossal ultra plenian that's tambora that we talked about the last time and then number eight is a mega colossal like toba the first thing we talked about this one's a six um so just like tambora and toba this one is in indonesia and um where crackatoa is located like if you're looking at australia if you go to the east coast of australia and go straight up you're going to hit Malaysia. It's between Malaysia and Australia. Okay.

That makes sense. So picture it there. The island of Krakatoa, so it was like an island, I had the volcano in the middle. It was part of a group of islands in that area. It may or may not have erupted in the past. And obviously something else probably happened in the millions of years that is not recorded. But in recorded history, it could have erupted anywhere between three and 11 times, but like maybe two. That we can actually kind of confirm with evidence.

There is a book called the Javanese Book of Kings, which is a non-scientific history of the area written in the 19th century. So kind of a lot of made-up stuff. But in that book, the author said that there was an eruption in 416 AD. And it's hard because their calendar was different than, you know, the Roman calendar, obviously. So, like, it's a little bit weird to, like, juggle that around. But in that history, they write that there was, like, a big bang and smoke in the air and all of those things. But there's no scientific evidence for that. There is a little bit of evidence for an eruption happening in 535 AD, which might be the one that he was talking about, but just got the date wrong.

Because in China, for all of history, since China's been able to write, they've been taking notes about everything. So there's a note in 535 AD in China being like, we just heard a big sound. We don't know what it is. So that could have been Krakatoa. There's also an ongoing list of things that happened. in like Java and like Indonesia and this area that like the native people have been writing on for a long time and something that happens culturally is like if you have like a record keeper in town who's keeping records of like things like oh this year the crops were like this or this year like

whatever these people came in from the ocean all these things if you are um if everything's going well, you're going to keep putting things in that book. If everything is not going well, you're going to stop because you have to rebuild your society. Does that make sense? Like, so after... You're saying that you would stop doing history? Yes, because you literally,

all of the houses got destroyed. So you can't, you take a break. So in 416, there's nothing happened. They kept writing. But in 535, they stopped writing for about two decades because maybe they were busy fixing everything, you know? So that's, that's the kind of

evidence that we have that maybe it happened in 535. There's another one in 1680. And we'll talk more about this. This is like, this is the Dutch East Indies. So a lot of Dutch people in this story, but a sailor named Johann Wilhelm Vogel arrived in 1679 to Sumatra, then went back to Batavia. Batavia is Jakarta, which is the capital of Indonesia. And he noticed that Krakatoa was different than the first time that he went past it, like

that it was a little bit like shorter and there was like smoke coming out of it. a sailor told him there had been an eruption and they'd seen some like pumice you could see the smoke and there were a little earthquake so it's like a little bit of evidence that that happened but we don't know if there was like a huge eruption before the big one makes sense yes something probably happened we're not 100% sure there's a lot of disparate accounts we'll never know it is all circumstantial yes but we knew it was like not a regular old island we knew something was up right you know even both things like people knew what volcanoes were and they knew and they you know would explain it like you know there's a really mean god on that island you're like yeah there is like don't it's gonna it's mean it's like always kind of smoking so we know this is the duchies indies like i just said a little history of the area obviously there's a big slave trade going through here this is a little bit after the mutiny on the bounty but a little bit like kind of in that same area captain cook who was the captain that was right before the mutiny on the bounty that knew the captain from the bounty, the one who was murdered in Hawaii. Remember that guy? I don't know the name. He's like one of the big Dutch explorers. Anyway, he stopped the Krakatoa and like had written about it before he was murdered in Hawaii. And this is also what they were what the Dutch were getting from this area. A lot of it was spices. And people have been getting spices from Indonesia for almost a thousand years and bringing it back to Europe. So pepper comes from this pepper is like one of the big

spices that comes from this part of Java. And our friend, Pliny the Elder, he, in one of his encyclopedias, when he wrote the first encyclopedia, he said that the Roman Empire spends so much on pepper that they're going to go bankrupt. And then he later died in Mount Vesuvius. It was kind of fun. Is there more utility to pepper than a seasoning? So, no, but like, imagine not having it. So, like, this is another thing. Have you ever seen that meme where white people find a bay leaf in their Chipotle and they freak out. I haven't, but that sounds right. It's like people being like, oh, my God, I paid $15 for the salad, and there's a leaf in it.

Like, I'm going to call Chipotle, whatever. And then people are like, white people spent like thousands of years colonizing the world for spices, and these people don't know what a bait leaf is. Is your position on this is that if you don't have pepper, I mean, that's a, You get to buy a lot of pepper to bankrupt the country. Yeah, but if you don't have it, like, I don't know. If you don't have any spices, like, I don't know, getting spices sounds really exciting. Obviously, and like, that's not my opinion.

That's like colonialism. Right. A lot of spices. Fair enough. That's the other way it happened. Yeah. So there's also starting in like the 11th century, there was a London Guild of Pepperers, which is now the London Guild of Grocers.

It just sounds very British. So like we've always, we've been thinking about Pepper for a very long time. But now it's the 1880s. It's definitely Dutch in that area. It's in in Jakarta. They're doing things that they're building these big Dutch bridges. And in the book that I read, they said that the best painting that we have or visual we have of these bridges is actually a painting that Van Gogh painted in Arl when he was institutionalized of one of these big bridges. And you can see it.

If you look it up, it's called. It's called the Langoli Bridge in Arles. Carl, L-A-N-G-L-O-I-S, L-A-N-G-L-I-S. So, it's really pretty. It's really pretty, of course. And so then there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of slavery, but there's also a lot of mixed culturally. There's people from China there.

There's people from all over the world in this area. It's a big port area, as we've learned over the years. And it's run by the Dutch East India Company. which you also have learned about. So now I'm going to take two side quests, one into evolution and two into tectonic plates. So first, Charles Darwin, who we know, had a colleague named Alfred Russell Wallace, who was also figuring out the same thing at the same time. So Darwin is in the Galapagos Islands.

Wallace is in Indonesia near Jakarta in this area. Wallace is actually the person who wrote a letter to Darwin and like used the words survival of the fittest first. So he was like figuring this out at the exact same time. He was a little bit more of like he's not as famous as Darwin obviously. He was kind of like always like they call him like the moon of Darwin because he's always like in his orbit. They were like friends kind of of Darwin like took all their credit. Whatever. That's probably more complicated than I just said.

But you know what I mean? But the basic idea is that they're looking at islands and they're looking at like the plants and the animals and they're like, well, why is this here and why is that there? Why does Australia have animals that nobody else has? You know, like, why are some animals everywhere? Why are some only in some places? Same with plants. Why does, like, why do islands have similar vegetation if they're separated?

So they're asking these questions and trying to understand, like, what could have caused this to happen? So part of their theory is there, like, something has to be, you know, bringing things between the islands in some way or something. So that's kind of, they're thinking about that. And then much later, there's a German scientist named Alfred Venager, and he was born in 1880, and he was looking at rocks the way Darwin was looking at alive things. Like he was looking at the earth and the surface of the earth in geology. And he was like, have you kind of seen the continents and the way that they fit together like a puzzle?

And people were pissed. They were like, fuck you. No. He wrote a paper in 1915, and they like ostracized him from the community. They were like, there's no way that's true. The earth is fixed. the people like the plates don't move there aren't plates nothing moves everything is just the way it is you know and people were really really mad um and then now there's i know you had not seen this but like

now there's literally a children's movie called ice age continental drift about the continent's drifting apart like in like less than a hundred years have you seen it there's like seven of them one of them was actually called continental drift um talking about when that actually happened because now you learned that in elementary school, but we didn't, we didn't accept that tectonic plates until 1965. No way. Which is wild. We were, we had a, we flew to the moon before we accepted that theory. We think it was the moon in 68, but close. Close enough. Okay. Fair enough. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. Like way recently, like after our parents were born, you know, like something that we like definitely take for, take for granted. So we just like hadn't thought about land moving. So

The plate tetonics is telling us that the land is constantly moving, which is both the ocean floor and the continental floor, which is like the land that we live on. Continental drift is continents, like maybe being pangia, like one big continent and then pulling apart, you know. Yeah. So in the 1960s, people started to revisit Alfred Venigar's things, like his hypotheses, because they were given access to ground penetrating radar. because of the Cold War, because they could say, like, oh, yeah, no, we have these guys up in Alaska studying the ground when really they're listening for Soviet nuclear tests, you know? So it gives them the opportunity to actually have these scientific discoveries. There's also things that they're learning, like in the Arctic. There's something this is complicated and I don't 100% have it, but there's something where like when a rock is formed, it like is and it cools to like be a rock.

its magnetic field locks in to the way that it was the day it was formed. So when a rock like finally cools, which is like solidifies and becomes a rock, it's the magnetic field of that rock will always point north and south. Like, you know, the rock can move, but like the magnetic field in it will always point to the poles north and south. So when they're looking at rocks in different layers, their magnetic poles move,

which either means the poles moved in history or the, the land moved you know i didn't know rocks had magnetic poles they do does i mean you can use a magnet on a rock come at me no so that you have to like have a very special thing to find yes no rocks aren't magnetic but they have like this like magnetic history inside of them taylor as our um as our resident geologist what is the very sophisticated thing you need to use to figure that out um Fars. Damn it. That's in the next part of my PhD in geology.

I'll let you know. So either the, either the poles moved or the ground moved. And so it means the ground moved, you know, so like the ground has shifted. Incidentally, one of the scientists that was one of the top people to bring this tectonic plate idea in the 60s, his name was Dr. S. Keith Runcorn. He, in 1995, when he was 73, he was murdered in his hotel room in San Diego as part of a robbery, which is terrible. He was just like about to speak about geology.

It's like old nerd man who's murdered, which is sad. So anyway, now people are like, we believe you, science, and we're learning about titanic plates for the first time, and it's 1965. So here's a couple of things. What's this guy's name again? Vinegar? Yeah, vinegar is a guy. Yeah, he's the guy, W-E-G-E-N-E-R.

Bigener, Alfred. He's the guy from, who wrote that paper. in 1915 that everybody was mad about not the guy who was murdered okay so here's a couple things that I learned about plates there's oceanic plates that are the plates that are under the ocean like the ocean floor when those bump into each other it creates islands which we've seen so you know underneath the ground there's like underneath the ocean there's like all those like mountains and stuff and they grow as that moves and that makes an island there is there are continental plates so that's like land land and when those hit each other they create huge mountains like Mount Everest huge right

because it's two like big plates hitting each other they create the Himalayas and like those big mountains the San Andreas fault that I live on is the is a conservative plate boundary and in this case it's two continental plates not hitting each other it's like as dramatically as like the Himalayas do, but they're next to each other. So in the book they described it as like a tire against the curb when you're parallel parking. Right.

So like that's what's happening here. So it's creating like little mountains and like little things, like nothing like the Himalayas. But then when that kind of like scoches and like the pressure builds up, that's when we have earthquakes over here. But it's not going to create a volcano because the volcano is created by a subject subduction zone, which is when an ocean plate and a land plate hit each other.

and the ocean plate is heavier because it's further down than the continental plate. I'm using my hand. So the ocean plate goes underneath the continental plate and then parts of the continental plate kind of fall into it and that creates sort of that like hole that creates a volcano. Oh my God. That's as far as I got. No, no. Okay.

So this stuff, Taylor, like I'm like, I've always been infinitely fascinated with this stuff because it is like scales that orders of magnitude that is so hard for your to even comprehend and wrap around but then you know you're joking about but you do the hand thing you just say which nobody can see but like you do the hand thing and it's like oh that makes sense like if there's magma in the middle of the earth and then the only thing separating it is the crust of the earth and the crust of the earth goes up is creating a spout for magma to flow out of hence volcanoes i love it we both use our hands i think i think we got it we are scientist, damn it.

Exactly. Oh, another thing that I wanted to tell you is that the African continental plate is slowly moving towards Europe, and that's why Turkey has a lot of earthquakes because it's like right in the middle of that spot. Makes sense.

Which I thought was interesting. Okay. So, now we know how volcanoes happen. They're in those zones. They are in those seduction zones. and now we're back to Krakatoa. It's a volcano, which we know.

So a little bit of history, again, in this area. In 1782, the Treaty of Paris made the Dutch East India Company bankrupt. Napoleon made his brother the king of Denmark because, of course, he did. So Napoleon's brother was technically in charge of the area for a little bit. But now it's the 1800s, and people are living on the island of Krakatowa. They're living on the neighboring islands. They're living in Jakarta, which is called Batavia at the time, which is about 100 miles away from Krakatoa.

And what makes this story different that I know I talked about last time is when Tambora erupted in like 1815, there was no global communication. Now there is. So this is the first event that the whole world knew about basically at the same time. Because it was the biggest disaster and we had telegraphs and we had underwater cables.

So in 1844, the first telegraph message was sent by Samuel Morse. Do you remember what he sent? No. What has God wrought? Oh, there's just no way I was going to guess that. I was the only like a knock-knock joke, baby. No. So by 1856, they have telegraphs in Jakarta.

So they have like a city gas works. In 1870, they had their own ice works, which I thought was fun because before that, they had to import ice from Boston, which sounds insane. Like, how do you get ice from Boston to Indonesia on a boat, keeping it very cold? There's a telephone, so things are kind of like starting to happen pretty quickly. And so it is, oh wait, another thing just to tell you is that there's the telegraph, which kind of goes through like the air, and then there have these subterranean cables. So the first one they laid broke, but the second one that they lay in the early 1880s, it works. So you can quickly send a message from like Indonesia to like mainland China and like up to Malaysia and like up to the rest of the world.

I literally, they put a cable in the ocean, which I know they do now, but like, it feels like a long time ago to do that. I always think that's crazy. That is crazy. How much cable do you take with you? How do you know, God, there's so much science involved in it. And so it also was able to work. The sub-oceanic cables were invented and only able to work because of a rubber that was only found in the Java area, which is cool. So it's because of like Indonesia in this area, found a rubber plant.

that was able to put rubber around these cables and have that work so i'm not we don't we don't use those cables anymore well i mean well not it's been it's been but how do we have any undersea cables no because we have satellites i don't know i'm looking at it right now wow man it's crazy what humans have done like me not me i'm not i'm not i'm not in genius. Yeah, not me either. And in a short amount of time.

So, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Can I pause to read you a poem? Yes. By Rudyard Kipling about underwater cables. I love Kipling.

I love his later work. Okay, ready? Yes. The wrecks, the wrecks the wrecks solve above us. Their dust drops down from afar, down to the dark, to the utter dark. where the blind white sea snakes are. There is no sound, no echo of sound in the deserts of the deep,

or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell bird cables creep. Here in the womb of the world, hear on the tyrobs of earth, words and the words of men flicker and flutter and beat, mourning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth, for a power troubles the still that has neither voice nor feet they have wakened the timeless things they have killed their father time joining hands in the gloom a league from the last of the sun hush men talk today over the waste of the ultimate slime and a new world runs between them whispering let us be one whoa kind of fun that's good yeah yeah you read it in a very mysterious way too which like help with the atmosphere i think It's creepy. I get it. It's creepy that it's down there. So now it's 1883. 1883 is a very wet year. So it's raining a ton. There's always little earthquakes around this area. But people start to notice weird things a couple weeks before the actual eruption. There's a captain who passes Crackatoa and he's like, it's a little dusty over there. Like the air is weird. You know, like when we woke up in the morning, there was like a little layer of dust on the deck. Like we're not sure exactly what's happening.

happening. There's a woman named Mrs. Vanderstock who loses the plate. It falls off the wall and she writes that down because like things are like the windows start shaking at random times. Like so the earth feels uncomfortable. There's like a weird vibration in the air like everybody can feel. And also another magnet thing like magnets get messed up because there's iron in the ash that like is starting to come out of Crackatoa. So that's messing up like compasses and things like that because like messing up the air. So it's just like, feels weird around. People start sending messages back to Europe being like something weird is happening. A fisherman said that he saw the beach of Prakatoa on fire. Like something's going on. Hey, don't like animals know this shit because they're like somehow tuned into like the magnet. You're going to get to this, aren't you? They might.

I have a story about this. But yes. Exactly. Oh, another thing that I learned in this book that I, I forget exactly where it fits. in, but Julius Reuter, like, of Reuters theme is like one of the first people who was like a international, like trying to get news across the world. He started with pigeons, like having like pigeons carry news over long areas of time. I guess a couple decades before this, he was able to get news of the assassination of President Lincoln to the UK in 12 days. So it's kind of fun.

However he did that on like a fast boat. So yes, to the animals. Do you remember when there was that little earthquake and like the, the, East Coast and all the animals, the D.C. Zoo went nuts. I don't remember that. Weird. No. What did they do?

I was in New York when it happened. And they just like started flying around weird and the monkeys are acting weird. All the animals are acting weird and they don't really know why that happens. Yeah. But it's the end of the summer. It's near the end of the summer. People are trying to act like everything is normal. There's a circus in town in, in Jakarta.

And in the circus, there's a baby elephant. And it's really freaking cute. And it starts to kind of freak out. like they who knows but like maybe because of this and the woman who's in charge of the baby elephant brings it to her room and it destroys the hotel room and the next day like feels better so it like knew it was coming i don't know if if dumbo saw does anything it's that maybe it missed its mom oh no oh never wants to the movie again so sad um so there's a there's a masked ball the night before um as well as people are trying to like they're going to the circus they're having a

time they're trying to live their lives, even though things are weird. At 10.02am on Sunday, the 27th of August, 1883, Krakatoa erupts. It completely destroys the island it was made of. So like Vesuvius is still a mountain. You know, you can still like see it. Cracotoa is gone. Oh, wow. It's totally gone.

The island is totally gone. 13% of the earth vibrated. Like people felt it thousands of miles away. They heard it thousands of miles away. it was like something that like people recorded hearing you know just super far away and again like we saw with tambora they were like are we being attacked is this like cannons like what is this it was one of the loudest sounds ever recorded in the history of the world it went around the earth like seven times oh wow yeah there's there's a there's this somebody did a graph of like um crackatoa the island like today or like it's a picture of the island today and then it shows where the original summit was and i'd say probably two-thirds of it are gone, give or take. It's hard to double the elevation. That's actually, that's not it.

That's a new island. That's a new island. Wow. Okay. Mm-hmm. Well, I'll tell you about it. A little. Crack or to go was totally gone.

So some things that happen, obviously, is everyone on the island dies. Anyone that was, like, near it dies. There's lightning in the clouds. The ash tomb goes 20. You were living on this? Yeah, like around it and, like, Not like the islands near it, yes. Because also, because like volcanic islands are very lush.

Yeah. You know, grow a lot of stuff there. So the ash goes, like 24 miles up into the air, hits the trade winds. So then that starts to go all over the world. At 5 p.m. pumice starts to fall, which burns, you know, obviously burns homes and people. People all over the world are now hearing about this. And they're also keeping track of the weather. So we talked about this the last time with Tambora where, like, we didn't know the weather.

People would just ask the oldest person they knew, you know? Right. Has it always been like this in June? You know? And like Thomas Jefferson was one of the first people to write down the weather, like, daily. And Benjamin Franklin was like, maybe it's a volcano. Like these guys were just thinking about this stuff all the time. But so we have a lot of logs of the weather all over the world after Krakatoa erupted because Victorians would like write it down in their diaries.

It was like a thing to do during that time. um so we we know that like in england there were brilliant sunsets so there's an artist named church one named ashcroft who did some beautiful watercolors probably the scream by munch was inspired by the sunsets yeah and um people could hear the sounds from thousands of miles away but um we knew what it was because it was the first time that there was like global news and people like knew it was happening pretty quickly so crackatoa is is the most deadly volcanic eruption that we have on our list.

The Dutch said the death toll was 36,417, but it's estimated it could be up to 120,000 people died. And a lot of them died because of the tsunami that came afterwards. So obviously it like mess up the ocean. And then there was a tsunami. It killed a lot of people recently there, like there when it just happened. The water rushed so fast that like in England,

Charles Darwin's son was like keeping track of the weather and he noticed a little like blip in the water like it got all the way to England you know like there was like a little bit of like a little bit of like a four inch higher tide in in like Europe than usual when it like killed some people that's like this question is probably not answer well what what okay so do the math on like why is it that one eruption is so much bigger than the other all it comes down to is pressure and the ability for that pressure to alleviate itself. So is that it implied that, like, for example, Krakatoa, the reason it was so powerful is because the pressure built longer because maybe the way the plates collided were denser

and stronger and couldn't erupt sooner? Maybe. I have no idea. Yeah, I figured that plug it on an answer the question. And I wonder if like the depth, maybe it's like the depth of like the like how far down it goes, like, maybe it goes, like, further into the core than, like, other ones, maybe? Maybe. Maybe. A mantle in a core.

Oh, got it. But, I mean, it's a good question. And then also, like, Tambora was technically higher on the scale, but it was mostly the atmospheric effects that made Tambora so deadly because it was, because it was so. Did you remember we're talking about this? If it had been like a smaller eruption, then like the, like, the way that like the light reflected off the ash, like made it worse. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. I can't remember. But you know what I mean? So there's that too. So there are tons of reports of people across the coast of Africa and along the Indian Ocean finding just like huge pieces of pumice stone like up to like year or year or two later coming up on the beach filled with skeletons. people and animals because like they people would get kills in the pumice and it would just get like swept off to sea so there's a lot of people who died that way there's the summer

temperatures and the northern hemisphere fell by the average of like one degree which like in the terms of climate change and thinking about that like one degree change like if it's like 70 to 69 who cares but if it's freezing to if it's not freezing to freezing then like people die you know what I mean like that degree is a big difference so um one story of a family that uh that did survive they were the byernick families they were in an anher which is a port town that was very close to um cracatoa mrs byernick was like things are weird things have been weird for a few weeks um that morning she asked to go to her country house which was up on a mountain and her husband was like no we're fine let's stay here in town he went down to the beach and he saw the ocean begin to swell he saw that like pull back back, like that weird thing the ocean does when he knows like the tsunami's coming. So them and their servants probably, that probably is a whole thing that wasn't great. They started running up this hill to get to their cottage. And it was like pitch black in the middle of the day.

There's pumice coming down. They're all burned. She's in her thing. She looks down in her arms and she sees that they're dirty and she tries to wipe off the dirt, but it's her burned skin. It's her burned skin. They're just like, and they're running in like some of her servants get there. Some of them don't. But their whole actual house is totally.

destroyed, but they do survive by being able to climb that hill and hiding in that house. But it was just like obviously a horror show. There's chaos, you know, there's loud booms for almost 20 hours. The tsunami, you know, is seen everywhere. By the fall and a couple months later, the atmosphere

in New York was changed that firefighters, the Bikipsey thought that there was a fire. And they kept looking around trying to find a fire and they couldn't find one because it was just like the atmosphere was like red, you know, like brilliant sunset. It's like totally different. colors like we know. So after this happened, obviously there's a ton of cleanup.

A lot of people are dead. A lot of people are just like destroyed in many different ways. The native population of this area is and was mostly Muslim. And they started to become more devout and believe that maybe their God was punishing the white people for, like the Dutch for being there. Not that there aren't white Muslim people, but you know, the Dutch for being there. And in 1888, there was a peasants revolt in the Bontan region.

It started with a stabbing of a Dutch politician. And that led to some changes in that area. So that's kind of happening between like the 1880s and like the 1900s. There's a bunch of unrest in the area politically. But in the meantime, in 1930, there's an island that appears where Krakatawa used to be. There were a couple little islands that came up between then in 1930, but they kept kind of going back. to the ocean. They didn't pop up for a long. But the one you see right now is called Anak Krakatau, which means the sun of Krakatoa. And it's kind of cute. And it's also cool

because it's a new island. And so we can go back to thinking about evolution and like, what grows on a new island? What animals are on a brand new island? It was an opportunity to be like, what is the first thing here? So guess what the first thing that this, the first animal they found on my island? Cockroach Spider Aw, I like spiders It was a little spider

And I don't like Like spiders But this is so cute I think he got there On like a little parachute Like he made his little Yeah The webbing thing

Spider web Yeah Into a parachute And then he like Parachuted onto the island It's really cute And was like I'm gonna live it by myself

So I feel Hopefully he had a good life Then other animals Start to comment It's like how they get there So either from like Being like maybe like they floated over on like a piece of pumice or a log people went there to try to

like watch the new vegetation and see what was going to happen and of course they brought rats so there's rats in the island now um those came definitely from people um but you know some of the seeds might come from like you know bird poop has seeds in it maybe that's how they got there but it's like it's been an opportunity to be like what happens if we start from nothing what happens and so they're like you know is it stuff like under the pumice maybe there's still seeds maybe there's still this like underneath these things we don't know So it's interesting. Other things that I learned about that area that I just hadn't gotten this far yet is that the Dutch actually remained in control of Indonesia until the 1940s when the Japanese invaded in World War II.

And Indonesia got its independence in 1945 after World War II was over. So I just didn't know that. So that's it. It's a really big one. And here's the things that I feel like I, my three big takeaways is I learned, well, I didn't know these things that. Hold on. I learned about subduction zones, which is like the ocean plate hitting the continental plate and creating that volcano because of the pressure. We learned about that.

I learned about tectonic plates and that that's a relatively new thing. I also learned that other, as far as we know, other planets don't have continental drift and titanic plates. Weird. I wonder why. like there might be one of the moons of like Jupiter might have them but they don't have oceans right that's a big part of it but like I think we're alone in that potentially actually wait what makes the continent drift is it the waves of the ocean it's just like they're constantly moving from like pressure from the core so it's not the ocean it's like the core is pressure up moving around so it's like the the oceanic plate is moving and the continental plate is moving because they're always kind of like being agitated by the core and the whole reason they're being agitated by the core this is it's so scary because I'm going to end on a real scary thing this is the third thing I learned that that's happening from the core because the core is cooling so as the core cools it has to have that pressure and the pressure is released by moving around the plates by volcanoes by like things that that that we see and what's going to happen eventually is the earth's core is going to just cool and then that's it then what happens the earth is over that everything will die yeah but then it wasn't a sun supposed

to explode too though yeah totally i don't know which one's going to happen first isn't like another galaxy supposed to absorb our galaxy well like our galaxy is like always growing there's like a special point that I sometimes we watch YouTube videos about that scares me where like it ends and we can never go any further but but the galaxy keeps getting pulled out that way I don't know this is it's a lot more existential than you think it would be I think it's just a volcano exploding but then you're like no it's like scientific discoveries and it's trying to figure out what's going on and it's like understanding that it's the earth but also is that more terrifying that the earth is like doing all these crazy things inside the core and it's something you learn in elementary school but you don't I don't think about it as like scarcely as it is as i do now wait so now i'm scared so so what uh what what right right two point eight two point eight years from now the surface temperature of the earth will have reached 300 degrees Fahrenheit at this point in two years life will no 2.8 billion oh okay so so But the core is cooling. Is the Earth's core cooling?

I hope someone uses this. It's like you can put us in your biography for your project at school. Yeah, the Earth's core is, oh, God. It's cooling faster than previously thought. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. How Earth's cooling molten core could destroy the planet. BBC science focus.

I'm going to take some deep breaths. I agree. Wait, solidification of the outer core. The inner core is expected to consume most or all of the outer core three to four billion years from now, resulting in almost completely solidified core composed of iron and other heavy elements. The surviving liquid envelope will mainly consist of lighter elements, yada yada yada yada

the interior will cool less efficiently which would slow down or stop the inner core's growth in either case this can result in a loss of magnetic dynamo the magnetic fuel of the earth will decay

in 10,000 years it will cause a I don't know what any of this means yeah I don't know what any of this episode because we know anyway wait it's a lot um i'm a you know the sun is going to grow to a level where it will consume the earth because it'll get so big it's called it's red giant phase i did know that i didn't know that

you learned that inexplicably when you're a kid they teach you that which i don't even want to know now because like it's out tomorrow i just like don't even want to think about it it kind of makes everything futile doesn't it like why are we even doing this podcast like why why looking at the cowboy's score right now like who cares literally nothing matters yep dope so three more volcanoes to go not that it matters not that any of this matters but yes not that it matters but i know a lot more by volcanoes than i did a year ago we're all going to die in a horrible flame somehow somehow So cool.

That's all I got. Thanks. Oh, thanks, Taylor. That was fun. Do you have anything you want to read out? I did, but I can't remember what it is. I don't have any listener mail. Oh, I did want to say my friend Elizabeth has been listening, and she's very cute.

And she was like, I've been yelling along with you guys. And she's like, I've been acting like you're just in my house with me talking to me. So I thought that was very nice. So I just said hi. And yeah, that's all I got for now. Please write to us. Doom DeFel pod at Gmail. break. And all of these socials at DunevillePod. There you have. Okay, we'll go ahead and cut this off and rejoin you all on Wednesday.