Two hundred years ago, a grandiose natural event took place on earth - the eruption of Tambor volcano, which affected the climate of the entire planet and claimed tens of thousands of human lives.
Tambor volcano is located in the northern partof the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, on the Sangar Peninsula. It is necessary to immediately clarify that Tambor is not the largest volcano in that region, in Indonesia there are about 400 volcanoes, and the largest of them, Kerinci, rises in Sumatra.
The Sangar Peninsula itself is 36 km wide,and in length has a length of 86 km. The height of the Tambor volcano itself by April 1815 reached 4,300 meters, the eruption of Tambor volcano in 1815 led to a reduction in its height to the current 2,700 meters.
After three years of all increasing activity, the volcanoTambora April 5, 1815 finally woke up when the first eruption occurred, which lasted 33 hours. The explosion of the volcano Tambor spawned a column of smoke and ash, rising to an altitude 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 more those were scared firstpeople that were away. The thunder of a volcanic explosion was heard on the island of Java in the densely populated city of Yogyakarta. Residents decided that they heard the thunder of guns. In this regard, the troops were brought to combat readiness, and ships began to ply along the coast in search of a ship in distress. However, the ashes that appeared the next day suggested the true reason for the sound of explosions.
Tambor volcano kept some calmcondition for several days, until April 10th. The fact is that this eruption did not lead to the outflow of lava, it froze in the mouth, contributing to the pressure and provoking a new, even more terrible eruption, which is what happened.
April 10 at about 10 ama new eruption occurred, this time a column of ash and smoke rose to an altitude of about 44 km. Thunder from the explosion was already heard on the island of Sumatra. At the same time, the eruption site (Tambor volcano) on the map relative to Sumatra is located very far, at a distance of 2,500 km.
According to eyewitnesses, by seven in the eveningday, the intensity of the eruption has increased, and by eight in the evening a hail of stones fell on the island, the diameter of which reached 20 cm, followed by ash again. By ten o'clock above the volcano, three fiery columns rising into the sky merged into one, and the volcano Tambor turned into a mass of "liquid fire." About seven rivers of hot lava began to spread in 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 the characteristic smell could be felt even in Batavia (the old name of the capital of Jakarta), located at a distance of 1,300 km.
After another two days, April 12, the volcano Tambor allstill continued his activity. Clouds of ash have already spread to the western shores of Java and the south of Sulawesi Island, which is 900 km from the volcano. According to the inhabitants, it was impossible to see the dawn until 10 o'clock in the morning, even the birds did not start singing until almost noon. The eruption ended only by April 15, and the ashes did not settle until April 17. The volcano's mouth formed after the eruption reached 6 km in diameter and 600 meters in depth.
It is estimated that during the eruption died onThe island is about 11 thousand people, 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 tsunami, whose action spread hundreds of kilometers around, also became the cause of death.
When the eruption of the volcano Tambor in 1815year, released an amount of energy of 800 megatons, which can be compared with the explosion of 50 thousand atomic bombs, similar to those dropped on Hiroshima. The eruption was eight times stronger than the well-known eruption of Vesuvius and four times more powerful than the eruption of the volcano Krakatau that happened later.
Eruption of the volcano Tambor lifted into the air 160cubic kilometers of solid matter, the thickness of the ash on the island reached 3 meters. Sailors sailing at that time for a few more years met on their way islands from pumice, reaching five kilometers in size.
Incredible amounts of ash and sulfur-containing gasesreached the stratosphere, rising to an altitude of more than 40 km. The ash covered the sun from everything alive, which was at a distance of 600 km around the volcano. And around the world there was an orange-haze and blood-red sunsets.
Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide released duringeruption, in the same 1815 reached Ecuador, and the next year caused climate change in Europe, the phenomenon was then called the “year without summer”.
In many European countries then brown fell out.and even reddish snow, almost every week there was snow in the Swiss Alps in the summer, and the average temperature in Europe was 2-4 degrees lower. The same decrease in temperature was observed in America.
Around the world, a bad harvest led to higher food prices and hunger, which, along with epidemics, claimed 200,000 lives.
The eruption that struck the volcano Tambor (1815), has become 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 over the past 10 thousand years, four such eruptions have occurred. Before the Tambor volcano, a similar catastrophe happened in 1257 on the neighboring island of Lombok, where Segara Anak lake is now located there with an area of 11 square kilometers (see photo).
Первым путешественником, сошедшим на остров с the purpose of visiting the frozen volcano Tambor was the Swiss botanist Heinrich Zollinger, who led a team of researchers to study the ecosystem created by the natural disaster. It happened in 1847, as much as 32 years after the eruption. Nevertheless, the smoke still continued to rise from the crater, and the researchers moving along the frozen crust, at its breaking, into still hot volcanic ash.
But scientists have already noted the birth of a new life ona white 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, casuarina thickets (a coniferous plant resembling ivy) were found.
As further observation showed, by 1896, 56 species of birds lived on the slopes of the volcano, and one of them (Lophozosterops dohertyi) was first discovered there.
Искусствоведы выдвигают гипотезу о том, что it was the unusually gloomy manifestations in nature caused by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano that inspired the creation of the famous landscapes of the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. His paintings are often decorated with gloomy, gray-lined sunsets.
But the most famous was the creation of Mary Shelley."Frankenstein", which was conceived in that summer of 1816, when, while still being the bride of Percy Shelley, she and her fiance and famous Lord Byron were visiting the shores of Lake Geneva. It was the bad weather and the incessant rains that inspired Byron with an idea, and he invited each of the satellites to invent and tell a terrible story. Mary invented precisely the story of Frankenstein, which formed the basis of her book, written two years later.
Сам лорд Байрон также под воздействием обстановки wrote the famous poem “The Darkness”, which Lermontov translated, 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 imbued with that hopelessness, which dominated nature that year.
The chain of inspirations was not interrupted by this, the poem “The Darkness” was read by Byron's doctor John Polidori, who, under her impression, wrote his novel “The Vampire”.
Famous carol "Silent Night"(Stille Nacht) was written in verse by German priest Joseph Mohr, which he composed in the same rainy year of 1816 and which opened a new romantic genre.
Surprisingly, but poor harvest and highbarley prices inspired the German inventor, Karl Drez, to build a vehicle that could replace a horse. So he invented a prototype of a modern bicycle, and it was the name of Drez that came into our everyday life with the word "trolley".
