Indonesia’s Directorate of Volcanology and Geologic Hazard Mitigation said that I should not attempt to climb Tambora-too dangerous. So when the chance arose to visit the volcano while on a trip last fall to Bali and other Spice Islands, I took it. The more I learned about the eruption of Tambora, the more intrigued I became, convinced that few events in history show more dramatically how earth, its atmosphere and its inhabitants are interdependent-an important matter given concerns such as global warming and destruction of the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer.
In my 40 years of geological work I had never heard of Tambora until a couple of years ago when I started researching a book on enormous natural disasters. Word of Tambora traveled no faster than a sailing ship, limiting its notoriety. But Krakatau is more widely known, partly because it erupted in 1883, after the invention of the telegraph, which spread the news quickly. The eruption of Tambora was ten times more powerful than that of Krakatau, which is 900 miles away. Climate experts believe that Tambora was partly responsible for the unseasonable chill that afflicted much of the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, known as the “year without a summer.” Tamboran gloom may have even played a part in the creation of one of the 19th century’s most enduring fictional characters, Dr. They have studied how debris from the volcano shrouded and chilled parts of the planet for many months, contributing to crop failure and famine in North America and epidemics in Europe.
It’s the eruption’s far-flung consequences, however, that have most intrigued scholars and scientists. An estimated 10,000 of the island’s inhabitants died instantly. The ground shook, sending tsunamis racing across the JavaSea. Rivers of incandescent ash poured down the mountain’s flanks and burned grasslands and forests. More than 13,000 feet high, Tambora blew up in 1815 and blasted 12 cubic miles of gases, dust and rock into the atmosphere and onto the island of Sumbawa and the surrounding area. The most destructive explosion on earth in the past 10,000 years was the eruption of an obscure volcano in Indonesia called MountTambora.
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