Krakatau ~ Krakatoa

The day after the eruption stopped, a ship named ‘Gouverneur-General London,’ passed by Krakatau, reported that two third of island was gone. Where the volcano had been, there was a submerged pit reaching down hundreds of feet underwater, surrounded by a frail archipelago of bare, burned death. Nothing that had lived on Krakatau had survived, not even a fly. Nine months later a naturalist visiting the island wrote, “In spite of all my searching I could find no sign of plant or animal life on the land, except a solitary very small spider; this strange pioneer of the renovation was in the process of spinning the web. - 155

Within a few years a thin coat of life was covering the island again. Cyanobacteria formed a gelatinous film over the ash, and later ferns, mosses, and a few flowering beach plants sprouted. By the 1890s, a savanna, with fig and coconut trees scattered across it, had grown on the islands. Along with the spiders lives beetles, butterflies, and even monitor lizard.

To cover the 27 miles from the mainland to the islands, plants and animals had to travel by sea or air. Seeds of some plants could float on the currents of the Sunda Strait. The monitor lizard could swim, and other animals could ride on top of the drift wood and rafts of plants. The spiders arrived on Krakatau by spinning silk balloons that carried them over the water. Birds and bats (including Malay flying fox, with 5-foot wingspan) could fly to Krakatau, and bring in their stomachs the seeds of fruits they had eaten on the mainland.

As the forests overtook the grasslands, many of the pioneer species that had arrived on Krakatau early on disappeared. . . . .Now almost 120 years, the flow of immigrants has allowed down considerably, Krakatau seems headed for an equilibrium. ~ page 153

Utterly fascinating! The boom as Kraktoa went could be heard far away but it was the tsunami that was most devastating. And now Krakatoa has a child, Anak Krakatoa, which is also going boom....

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Krakatoa, earlier misnamed Krakatoa, an island the size of Manhattan located midway in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, came to an end on Monday morning, August 27, 1883. It was dismembered by a series of powerful volcanic eruptions. The most violent occurred at 10:02 a.m. blowing upward like the shaped explosion of a large nuclear bomb, with an estimated force equivalent to 100-150 megaton of TNT. . . . page 149

. . . The original name of Krakatau was Karkata, or Sanskrit for “crab”; Rakata also means crab in old Javanese language. . . . .

If the fauna and flora came back chaotically, they also came back fast. In the fall of 1884, a little more than a year after the eruption, biologists encountered a few shoots of grass, probably ‘Imperata' and ‘Saccharum.’ In 1886 there were fifteen species of grasses and shrubs. Ins 1897 forty-nine, and in 1928 nearly three hundred. Vegetation dominated by ‘Impomoea’ spread along the shores. At the same time grassland dotted with Casuarina pines gave way here and there to richer pioneer stands of trees and shrubs. In 1919 W. M. Docters van Leeuwen, from the Botanical Gardens at Buitenzog, found forest patches surrounded by nearly continuous grassland. Ten years later he found the reverse: forest now clothed the entire island and was choking out the last of the grassland patches. Today Rakat ais covered completely by tropical Asia rain forest typical in outward appearance. Yet the process of colonization is from from complete. Not a single tree species characterizing the deep, primary forests of Java and Sumatra has made it back. Another hundred years or more may be needed for investment by a forest fully comparable to the old, undisturbed Indonesian islands of the same size. ~ Page 155