Forces of Nature: Krakatoa

My recent trip to Indonesia was confined to the hotel and car trips around Central Jakarta. The only sites I was able to visit on foot were the Monument Nasional or Monas and Pondok Laguna, an authentic Indonesian restaurant. Optimistic that I will someday get the chance to visit Indonesia again, I did my homework (albeit, belatedly) and checked out literature on must-see places in Indonesia. The discovery made me all the more regretful that I didn't get the chance to look around. I didn't realize that Indonesia had many attractions which are of interest to me. And since one of my special interests is geology, I heaved a sigh of regret after I was reminded that Indonesia is one of the geologically eventful places in the planet. Catastrophic and cataclysmic events, which some authors claimed had worldwide changing effects, happened in Indonesia.

Fifteen years ago, in the not so distant past, we in Metro Manila and other parts of Asia and the world, woke up to find that our surroundings had turned gray. There was a storm, and the storm carried away, far away, ash which had been forcefully spewed by relatively unknown Mt. Pinatubo in Zambales, as if throwing a fit due to the lack of recognition of its might that it had suddenly decided to roar away all its angst. And its angst we felt indeed. Town-burrying, raging pyroclastic materials poured down its slopes and turned the lush and verdant rice granary of the Philippines into a virtual desert, the sight of endless gray sand pervaded for quite sometime. If not for the reliable and strategically sound direction of Raymundo Punongbayan and his team, many would have perished. But while lives were saved, all activities in Central Luzon were put to a halt due to the eruption. As for the rest of the world, the optimist enjoyed the magnificent sunsets while the pessimist worried about the drop in the temperatures worldwide. One roar of Pinatubo and the entire world stirred.

Imagine a disaster of Pinatubo's magnitude ten-fold - that was Krakatau or Krakatoa to the author of the book "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. And when Simon Manchester says "exploded", he wasn't exagerrating. Krakatoa's explosion in 1883 was so forceful it drove away the Dutch colonizers who had been in Indonesia for 350 years, as the Americans were whisked away by Pinatubo when it burried its Naval and Airbase in Subic and Angeles, respectively. Krakatoa roared on that fateful day in August and her roar was heard as far as the other side of the Indian Ocean in Mauritius. Its explosion reverberated in the air and circled the globe seven times. The word "exploded" actually seems inadequate to capture the way it regurgitated chunks of earth, itself included, such that after the explosion, almost none of it was left. As it turned out, its thunderous, earth shaking roar was to be its valedictory. And oh, like a departing queen, the sea parted when it went, pushing out water and creating gargantuan tsunamis which were powerful enough to buoy a voyage ship two miles away from the shore, upstream. Forty years after the 1883 eruption, Anak Krakatoa surfaced from the sea where Krakatoa used to be - and it has been growing at an astounding rate of 5 inches per week!

Volcanoes and earthquakes are derided, and dreaded. It is seen as God's curse, a punishment for man's misdeeds, a means for atonement. I do not see it that way. I've always been fascinated with volcanoes and the earth and how it cradles and nurtured life in the most ironic way. Always, the mechanics of geological forces are disruptive and catastrophic in the short term, but beneficial for a hundred fold people in the long term. Absent these forces, there would be no life on earth, there would be no land to stand on, on trees to bear fruit and no greens to nourish man and animal alike. It is an enigma which is hard to comprehend - such as life. Everything that God created has a purpose and what may cause woe and misfortune in the present, would turn out to be a blessing in the future. Simon Winchester's book, in a secular and scientific way, illustrates this. It also serves as a reminder, especially in the light of the December 26, 2004 tsunami causing earthquake and the waking up of Merapi in Yogyakarta, Indonesia as well as Taal, Mayon, Bulusan and Kanlaon in the Philippines, that we should be always prepared. Always.