Five eruptions and what they did
Krakatoa, Tambora, Vesuvius, Mount Pelée, and the Year Without a Summer.
5 questions. Pick an answer to see the explanation. Share your result at the end.
How far away was the 1883 Krakatoa explosion heard?
The fourth explosion of Krakatoa on 27 August 1883 was heard by the chief of police on Rodrigues island in the western Indian Ocean, 4,800 km away — over four hours after the eruption, on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean. It is the loudest sound in recorded human history.
In what year did Mount Tambora — the largest volcanic eruption in 1,300 years — erupt?
Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted catastrophically on 10 April 1815. It killed roughly 71,000 people in the immediate region and cooled the Earth by about half a degree Celsius for two years — producing the Year Without a Summer in 1816. Krakatoa (1883) was about a quarter as powerful, despite being more famous.
Where and how did Pliny the Elder die during the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD?
Pliny the Elder commanded the Roman fleet at Misenum and sailed across the Bay of Naples on a rescue mission. Floating pumice prevented landing near Herculaneum so he diverted to Stabiae and stayed at his friend Pomponianus's villa. When the second pyroclastic surge reached Stabiae the next morning Pliny — asthmatic and overweight — collapsed on the beach and could not be revived. The household survived.
True or false: A prisoner in a Saint-Pierre dungeon was one of only two survivors of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption.
True. Louis-Auguste Cyparis, a stevedore arrested for fighting two days earlier, survived in a windowless stone cell with one east-facing door — away from the volcano. He was severely burned through the cell's ventilation grate but lived. He was later signed by Barnum & Bailey Circus and toured as 'the man who lived through Doomsday.' The other survivor, Léon Compère-Léandre, was at the southern edge of the city in a thick-walled stone house.
Where did Mary Shelley begin writing Frankenstein in 1816?
In June 1816, Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) was at the Villa Diodati on the south shore of Lake Geneva, trapped indoors by the cold rain of the Year Without a Summer — the climate consequence of the 1815 Tambora eruption. Byron proposed a ghost-story competition. Frankenstein was the result.