Download or read book Krakatoa written by Simon Winchester and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-06-03 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Winchester's brilliant chronicle of the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 charts the birth of our modern world. He tells the story of the unrecognized genius who beat Darwin to the discovery of evolution; of Samuel Morse, his code and how rubber allowed the world to talk; of Alfred Wegener, the crack-pot German explorer and father of geology. In breathtaking detail he describes how one island and its inhabitants were blasted out of existence and how colonial society was turned upside-down in a cataclysm whose echoes are still felt to this day.
Download or read book The Eruption of Krakatoa written by Royal Society (Great Britain). Krakatoa Committee and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Day the World Exploded written by Simon Winchester and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eruptions. Explosions. Shock waves. Tsunamis. The almighty explosion that destroyed the volcano island of Krakatoa was followed by an immense tsunami that killed more than thirty thousand people. The effects of the waves were felt as far away as France, and bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. Today, one hundred and twenty-five years after the volcano erupted in one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known, the name Krakatoa is still synonymous with disaster. In this illustrated account based on Simon Winchester's bestselling Krakatoa, the colossal explosion is brought to vivid life. From the ominous warnings leading up to the eruption to the wave of killings it provoked, here is an engaging and insightful look at what happened on the day the world exploded.
Download or read book Krakatau written by Muhammad Saleh and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In August 1883 massive volcanic eruptions destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatau, in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. It was the day the world exploded. A tsunami wreaked havoc in the region, causing countless deaths, and shock waves were recorded around the world. Ash from the eruption affected global weather patterns for years. Since that time Krakatau has been the subject of more than 1,000 reports and publications, both scholarly and literary but the only surviving account of the event written by an indigenous eyewitness—Syair Lampung Karam (The Tale of Lampung Submerged), by Muhammad Saleh—has only now, after 130 years, found its way into English translation. * * * Pada bulan Agustus 1883 letusan besar gunung berapi meluluhlantakkan dua per tiga Pulau Krakatau yang terletak di Selat Sunda, di antara Sumatra dan Jawa. Tsunami memorakporandakan wilayah itu, dan guncangannya terasa di seluruh dunia. Abu letusan itu memengaruhi pola cuaca global hingga bertahun-tahun. Satu-satunya laporan saksi mata pribumi yang tersisa tentang peristiwa tersebut—Syair Lampung Karam, hasil karya Muhammad Saleh—disajikan pertama kalinya di sini dalam tiga bentuk: bahasa Melayu beraksara Romawi, bahasa Melayu beraksara Jawi dan terjemahan bahasa Inggris. Syair naratif panjang ini ditulis dan dicetak di Singapura pada tahun 1883 sewaktu Muhamad Saleh mencari suaka di negeri itu, menceritakan reaksi warga setempat terhadap malapetaka yang menimpa seluruh wilayah itu dan memperkaya pengetahuan kita tentang bencana alam Krakatau ini.
Download or read book Krakatau written by Ian W. B. Thornton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine months after the explosion, a French expedition searching for signs of life discovered a single spider that had crossed to the island on a balloon of silk. Life had returned to Krakatau. Scientists have been studying the island ever since.
Download or read book Catastrophe written by David Keys and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2000-10-02 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world—essentially the modern world as we know it today—began to emerge. In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago. The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave. Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland. In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.
Download or read book Tsunamis written by Kenji Satake and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-10-17 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely review of state-of-the-art tsunami research, covering case studies and recent developments from various approaches. Provides a practical guide to improving operational tsunami warning systems and mitigating coastal hazard from tsunamis.
Download or read book No Return Ticket Leg Two written by Captain Skip Rowland and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers around the world were enthralled by the first voyage of Skip Rowland and his yacht 'Endymion'. In this second leg of No Return Ticket, Skip tells of his further adventures battling storms, a flooded river, a host of maritime dangers and narrowly avoiding capture by pirates.This is a story of real-life adventure at sea, told by a master story teller.
Download or read book Waking the Giant written by Bill McGuire and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the rapid climate change will provoke geophysical events, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.
Download or read book The 1883 Eruption of Krakatoa written by Charles River Editors and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the eruption *Includes a bibliography for further reading "In 1883, Krakatoa suddenly sprang into notoriety. Insignificantly though it had hitherto seemed the little island was soon to compel by its tones of thunder the whole world to pay it instant attention. It was to become the scene of a volcanic outbreak so appalling that it is destined to be remembered throughout the ages." - Sir Robert Ball Volcanic eruptions have amazed people for millennia, and notorious ones like the eruption of Mount St. Helens can still be immediately recalled even by some who weren't alive at the time, but perhaps the most famous and most destructive eruption in modern history was the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Even without the instantaneous forms of communication that are now available, the world watched in wonder for new updates about a tiny South Pacific island, and though few of them would ever go there, Krakatoa remained a source of fascination for the much of the world for the next 50 years. Krakatoa had already been the scene of volcanic activity for hundreds of years, and some of the eruptions had been documented by early European explorers in the 17th century. In 1681, one Dutchman named Johann Wilhelm Vogel noted, "I saw with amazement that the island of Krakatoa, on my first trip to Sumatra [June 1679] completely green and healthy with trees, lay completely burnt and barren in front of our eyes and that at four locations was throwing up large chunks of fire. And when I asked the ship's Captain when the aforementioned island had erupted, he told me that this had happened in May 1680...He showed me a piece of pumice as big as his fist." Nonetheless, nobody could have prepared for the scope of the 1883 eruption, which was so violent that it destroyed most of the island of Krakatoa and could be heard about 3,000 miles away. The force of the explosion was equivalent to four times the strength of the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, and the spread of ash and lava, as well as the tsunamis generated by the force of the eruption, ultimately killed at least 35,000 people (and possibly over 100,000) across the Dutch East Indies. With plumes of smoke rising upwards of 50 miles in the air, Krakatoa's eruption influenced the entire global climate for several years, and debris and corpses were still washing up on shores across the Pacific throughout that time. The force was so powerful that it actually affected the height of waves in the English Channel. The 1883 Eruption of Krakatoa chronicles the history of one of the world's most notorious natural disasters. Along with a bibliography and pictures of important people and places, you will learn about Krakatoa like never before, in no time at all.
Download or read book After the Ashes written by Sara K. Joiner and published by Holiday House. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1883, on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, thirteen-year-old Katrien Courtland is determined to prove Darwin's theory of natural selection. Unfortunately, nothing causes her Aunt Greet more angst than Katrien crawling around the muddy jungle collecting bugs in the name of science -- and in the company of a native boy, no less! If only Katrien would take an interest in running a household and making friends with other girls. But Katrien has no interest in changing, especially if it means socializing with the likes of mean Brigitta Burkhart. Then, one stifling afternoon, Katrien's world turns upside-down when the nearby volcano Krakatau erupts with a terrifying blast. For days, a deathly ash rains down on the Javan coast. Amidst the chaos, Katrien knows her only hope of survival is to flee the jungle with the one person she vowed she'd never befriend.
Download or read book The Last Volcano written by John Dvorak and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Dvorak, the acclaimed author of Earthquake Storms, looks into the early scientific study of volcanoes and the life of the man who pioneered the field, Thomas Jaggar. Educated at Harvard, Jaggar went to the Caribbean after Mount Pelee exploded in 1902, killing more than 26,000 people. Witnessing the destruction and learning about the horrible deaths these people had suffered, Jaggar vowed to dedicate himself to a study of volcanoes. In 1912, he built a small science station at the edge of a lake of molten lava at Kilauea volcano in the Hawaiian Islands. Jaggar found something else at Kilauea: true love. For more than twenty years, Jaggar and Isabel Maydwell ran the science station, living in a small house at the edge of a high cliff that overlooked the lava lake, Maydwell quickly becoming one of the world’s most astute observers of volcanic activity.Mixed with tales of myths and rituals, as well as the author’s own experiences and insight into volcanic activity, The Last Volcano reveals the lure and romance of confronting nature in its most magnificent form—the edge of a volcanic eruption.
Download or read book When Humans Nearly Vanished written by Donald R. Prothero and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating true story of the explosion of the Mount Toba supervolcano--the Earth's largest eruption in the past 28 million years--and its lasting impact on Earth and human evolution Some 73,000 years ago, the huge dome of Mount Toba, in today's Sumatra, Indonesia, began to rumble. A deep vibration shook the entire island. Jets of steam and ash emanated from the summit, followed by an explosion louder than any sound heard by Homo sapiens since our species evolved on Earth. The eruption of the Toba supervolcano released the energy of a million tons of explosives; seven hundred cubic miles of magma spewed outward in an explosion forty times larger than the largest hydrogen bomb and more than a thousand times as powerful as the Krakatau eruption in 1883. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop by five to nine degrees. It took a full decade for Earth to recover to its pre-eruption temperatures. When Humans Nearly Vanished presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide. Human genes today show evidence of a "genetic bottleneck," an effect seen when a population of organisms becomes so small that their genetic diversity is greatly reduced. This group of survivors could be the ancestors of all humans alive today. Donald R. Prothero explores the geological and biological evidence supporting the Toba bottleneck theory; reveals how the explosion itself was discovered; and offers insight into how the world changed afterward and what might happen if such an eruption occurred today. Prothero's riveting account of this calamitous supervolcanic explosion is not to be missed.
Download or read book Volcanoes in Human History written by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the volcano Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815, as many as 100,000 people perished as a result of the blast and an ensuing famine caused by the destruction of rice fields on Sumbawa and neighboring islands. Gases and dust particles ejected into the atmosphere changed weather patterns around the world, resulting in the infamous ''year without a summer'' in North America, food riots in Europe, and a widespread cholera epidemic. And the gloomy weather inspired Mary Shelley to write the gothic novel Frankenstein. This book tells the story of nine such epic volcanic events, explaining the related geology for the general reader and exploring the myriad ways in which the earth's volcanism has affected human history. Zeilinga de Boer and Sanders describe in depth how volcanic activity has had long-lasting effects on societies, cultures, and the environment. After introducing the origins and mechanisms of volcanism, the authors draw on ancient as well as modern accounts--from folklore to poetry and from philosophy to literature. Beginning with the Bronze Age eruption that caused the demise of Minoan Crete, the book tells the human and geological stories of eruptions of such volcanoes as Vesuvius, Krakatau, Mount Pelée, and Tristan da Cunha. Along the way, it shows how volcanism shaped religion in Hawaii, permeated Icelandic mythology and literature, caused widespread population migrations, and spurred scientific discovery. From the prodigious eruption of Thera more than 3,600 years ago to the relative burp of Mount St. Helens in 1980, the results of volcanism attest to the enduring connections between geology and human destiny. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Download or read book Volcanic Eruptions and Their Repose Unrest Precursors and Timing written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volcanic eruptions are common, with more than 50 volcanic eruptions in the United States alone in the past 31 years. These eruptions can have devastating economic and social consequences, even at great distances from the volcano. Fortunately many eruptions are preceded by unrest that can be detected using ground, airborne, and spaceborne instruments. Data from these instruments, combined with basic understanding of how volcanoes work, form the basis for forecasting eruptionsâ€"where, when, how big, how long, and the consequences. Accurate forecasts of the likelihood and magnitude of an eruption in a specified timeframe are rooted in a scientific understanding of the processes that govern the storage, ascent, and eruption of magma. Yet our understanding of volcanic systems is incomplete and biased by the limited number of volcanoes and eruption styles observed with advanced instrumentation. Volcanic Eruptions and Their Repose, Unrest, Precursors, and Timing identifies key science questions, research and observation priorities, and approaches for building a volcano science community capable of tackling them. This report presents goals for making major advances in volcano science.
Download or read book Krakatoa Lighthouse written by Allan Baillie and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2009-03-02 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suddenly there was a trench across the beach, about ten meters away from the fishermen, where before there had been nothing but flat sand. The fishermen moved quickly away as the trench heaved grey ash across the sand. They sprinted when it hurled black rocks at them. Kerta didn't want to go to Krakatoa. He knows that a dark spirit, Orang Aljeh, is there and he is terrified he might wake it. But Kerta is there on the volcano, and the Ghost of Krakatoa has woken up. A powerful story of survival and loss based on the real-life events of the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. Winner of the 2010 New South Wales Premier's Literary Award Patricia Wrightson Prize 'This book is a marvel of precision and economy, stuffed to the gunnels with ideas, and brimming over with a dark energy...a masterclass in how to write...Krakatoa Lighthouse is that rare find: an exciting, moving story that keeps opening the doors to larger questions. Baillie puts the reader right there in the moment with stunningly accurate detail...yet we never feel the dead hand of history overwhelming us.' From the 2010 NSW Premier's Literary Award Judges' Report
Download or read book Eruption The Untold Story of Mount St Helens written by Steve Olson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting history of the Mount St. Helens eruption that will "long stand as a classic of descriptive narrative" (Simon Winchester). For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings from Mount St. Helens in southwestern Washington State. Still, no one was prepared when a cataclysmic eruption blew the top off of the mountain, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land and killing fifty-seven people. Steve Olson interweaves vivid personal stories with the history, science, and economic forces that influenced the fates and futures of those around the volcano. Eruption delivers a spellbinding narrative of an event that changed the course of volcanic science, and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world.
