The volcano of Tambor. The eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815

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

Geographical location of the volcano

The volcano of Tambora is located in the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, on the Sangar peninsula. It should immediately be clarified that Tambora is not the largest volcano in that region, Indonesia has about 400 volcanoes, 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 volcano Tambora by April 1815 reached 4300 meters, the eruption of the volcano Tambora in 1815 led to a reduction in its height to the current 2700 meters.

The beginning of the eruption

After three years of increasing activity, Tambora volcano on April 5, 1815, finally woke up, when the first eruption took place, which lasted 33 hours. The explosion of the Tambor volcano gave rise to a column of smoke and ash that 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 an unusual occurrence.

It is noteworthy that the people who were far away were scared at first. The thunder of the volcano explosion was heard on the island of Java in the densely populated city of Yogyakarta. Residents decided that they could hear the thunder of guns. In this regard, the troops were alerted, and along the coast, ships began to cruise in search of a ship that was in trouble. However, the ash that appeared the next day suggested the true cause of the heard sound of the explosions.

The Tambor volcano maintained some quiet state for several days, until 10 April. The fact is that this eruption did not lead to the outflow of lava, it froze in the vent, contributing to pressuring and provoking a new, even more terrible eruption, which happened.

On April 10 at about 10 am a new eruption occurred, this time the column of ash and smoke rose to a height of about 44 km. The rumble of thunder from the explosion was already heard on the island of Sumatra. In this case, the place of eruption ( Tambora volcano ) on the map relative to Sumatra is very far, at a distance of 2,500 km.

According to eyewitnesses, by 7 pm on the same day, the intensity of the eruption had increased, and by 8 pm a hail of stones, the diameter of which reached 20 cm, fell down on the island, followed by the ashes again. By ten o'clock in the evening above the volcano, the three fire columns that had risen to the sky had merged into one, and the volcano of Tambor had 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 to 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.

The end of the eruption

Two days later, on April 12, the Tambor volcano still continued its activity. The ash clouds have already spread to the western shores of Java and the south of Sulawesi Island, which is 900 km from the volcano. According to residents, it was impossible to see dawn until 10 am, even the birds did not start singing until almost noon. The eruption was completed only by April 15, and the ashes did not settle until April 17. The volcano's vent after the eruption reached 6 km in diameter and 600 meters in depth.

Victims of the Tambor volcano

It is estimated that about 11 thousand people perished on the island during the eruption, but this did not stop the number of victims. Later, as a result of the famine and epidemics on the island of Sumbawa and the neighboring island of Lombok, about 50,000 people died, and the tsunami that had erupted after the eruption, which spread hundreds of kilometers around, died as a result of the deaths.

Physics of consequences of the disaster

When the eruption of the Tambor volcano occurred in 1815, the amount of energy released was 800 megatons, which can be compared with the explosion of 50,000 nuclear bombs, similar to those dropped on Hiroshima. The eruption was eight times stronger than the known eruption of Vesuvius and four times more powerful than the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa that happened.

The eruption of the Tambora volcano raised 160 cubic kilometers of solid matter, the ash thickness on the island reached 3 meters. The sailors, who were sailing at that time, for several years met on their way islands of pumice, reaching a size of five kilometers.

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

"A Year Without Summer"

Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide released during the eruption in the same year 1815 reached Ecuador, and the following year caused climate change in Europe, a phenomenon that was then called "a year without summer."

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

Throughout the world, a bad harvest led to higher food and hunger prices, which, along with the epidemics, claimed 200,000 lives.

Comparative characteristics of the eruption

The eruption that befell the Tambora Volcano (1815) became unique in the history of mankind, it was given 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 there were four such eruptions. Before the volcano of Tambor, a similar catastrophe happened in 1257 on the neighboring island of Lombok, on the site of the volcano's mouth now there is Lake Segara Anak with an area of 11 square kilometers (pictured).

The first visit to the volcano after the eruption

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

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

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

The impact of the eruption on art and science

Art critics hypothesize that it is precisely the unusually gloomy manifestations in nature caused by the eruption of an Indonesian volcano that inspired the creation of the famous landscapes of the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. His paintings often adorn the gloomy, gray-clad 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 a bride of Percy Shelley, along with the bride and the famous lord Byron, stayed on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was bad weather and incessant rains that inspired Byron's idea, and he suggested to each of the companions to come up with and tell a terrible story. Mary came up with the very story of Frankenstein, which formed the basis of her book, written two years later.

Lord Byron himself also influenced the situation wrote a famous poem "Darkness", which Lermontov translated, here are lines from it: "I saw a dream that was not quite a dream. The brilliant sun has gone out ... "The whole work was imbued with the hopelessness that prevailed over nature that year.

On this chain of inspiration was not interrupted, the poem "Darkness" was read by Byron's doctor John Polidori, who, under her impression, wrote her novel "Vampire".

The famous Christmas hymn "Quiet Night" (Stille Nacht) was written on the verses of the German priest Josef Mora, which he composed in the same inclement 1816 and which opened a new romantic genre.

Surprisingly, the poor harvest and high prices for barley inspired Karl Dreze, the German inventor, to build a transport capable of replacing a horse. So he invented the prototype of a modern bicycle, and it was the name Dreza that came into our everyday life with the word "dresin".