August 27, 1883. The island of Krakatoa, squatting in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, decided it had had enough of existing in its current form.
What followed wasn’t just an eruption—it was the geological equivalent of a planet-sized temper tantrum that killed roughly 36,000 people, most of them drowned by tsunamis that reached 120 feet high. The explosion was so loud it ruptured eardrums of sailors 40 miles away and was heard in Perth, Australia, nearly 2,000 miles distant. Try wrapping your head around that: a sound traveling across an ocean and still loud enough to make people stop and say, “What the hell was that?”
When a Mountain Screams Loud Enough to Circle the Earth Four Times
The acoustic shock wave from Krakatoa circled the globe seven times. Seven. Times. Barometers in weather stations across Europe went haywire, spiking and dipping as invisible ripples of air pressure pulsed past. This wasn’t just loud—it was a sound that literally rewrote what scientists thought was possible in terms of acoustic energy.
Turns out the eruption ejected roughly 5 cubic miles of rock, ash, and pumice into the atmosphere. For context, that’s enough material to bury the entire island of Manhattan under 30 feet of volcanic debris. The eruption column shot 50 miles into the sky, punching through the stratosphere like it wasn’t even there. Ash fell as far as 1,600 miles away, and ships reported floating pumice rafts so thick they impeded navigation for months afterward.
The Sky Turned Colors That Shouldn’t Exist in Nature’s Palette
Here’s the thing about pumping 25 cubic kilometers of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere: it does weird things to sunlight.
For the next year, people around the world witnessed sunsets so intensely red and orange that fire departments were called out repeatedly for “fires” that didn’t exist. The artist Edvard Munch was so disturbed by the blood-red skies over Norway that some art historians believe they directly inspired “The Scream.” Global temperatures dropped by about 1.2 degrees Celsius in the year following the eruption because all that particulate matter acted like a planetary sunshade. Crops failed across multiple continents. Summer frosts hit New England in June of 1884.
Wait—maybe that sounds familiar? That’s because Krakatoa basically pulled a repeat performance of what Tambora did in 1815, which gave us “The Year Without a Summer.” Volcanoes, it turns out, are really good at screwing with global climate.
The Tsunami That Erased Entire Coastal Towns From Existence
The deadliest part wasn’t the explosion itself but what came after. When roughly two-thirds of the island collapsed into the emptied magma chamber below, it displaced an absolutely staggering amount of seawater. The resulting tsunamis obliterated 165 coastal villages and towns. The Dutch colonial ship Berouw was carried nearly two miles inland and deposited 30 feet above sea level, where it sat like some kind of surreal monument to the ocean’s fury.
Corpses washed up on the coast of East Africa. Pumice rafts carrying human skeletons drifted across the Indian Ocean for months. The wave was still a meter high when it reached the English Channel, over 11,000 miles away. That’s not a tsunami—that’s the ocean having a panic attack.
What’s Left Behind When a Mountain Deletes Itself
The island of Krakatoa essentially vaporized itself. Where once stood a volcanic peak, there was now a submarine caldera 820 feet below sea level. The eruption was so violent it created a geological blank slate—and then, in 1927, something started growing in the ruins. A new volcanic cone began emerging from the seafloor, and it’s been erupting on and off ever since. They call it Anak Krakatau: “Child of Krakatoa.”
In December 2018, Anak Krakatau collapsed into the sea during an eruption, triggering another deadly tsunami that killed over 400 people. History, apparently, has a sick sense of humor about repeating itself in the exact same geological location.
The 1883 eruption remains one of the deadliest volcanic events in recorded history and certainly the loudest thing humans have ever witnessed that wasn’t nuclear. It fundamentaly changed how we understand volcanic hazards, tsunami generation, and atmospheric science. Not bad for a mountain that no longer exists.
