Krakatoa
Page 44
* The site today of the enormous Krakatoa Iron & Steel Works.
* A concentration of escaping gas from the seabed can, in certain circumstances, create a zone of negative buoyancy, where passing ships are at risk of sinking. This happened in the 1970s when a seabed gas well in the North Sea fractured, and an inverted cone of small bubbles rose from it to form, at the surface, half a square mile that was more gas than water, and not at all buoyant. Moreover, the escaping gas was highly flammable, which nicely doubled the hazard.
* It will be recalled that the 1883 eruption threw up a pair of low spits to the north of the ruins, which were called Steers and Calmeyer Islands. The breakers had eroded Calmeyer back down to sea-level at the time of a visit in May 1884, and Steers lingered only until the end of the same year. At the time of the renewed volcanic activity in the twenties all that remained of them was a pair of oddly shaped and navigationally inconvenient shallows. † The crater lake in the caldera of the notoriously destructive Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines has a similar hot spot above a vent; steam hangs above the lake at this point, and up close the water hisses with bubbles and is hot to the touch. I once paddled a plastic canoe into the hot zone, and it began to melt, sagging alarmingly under my weight.
* He later built a concrete and corrugated iron bunker on Panjang Island, to the north-east, from which to view the new activity.
* The question of whether all life was totally destroyed, and whether the remnants of Krakatoa were totally sterile, remains open. Certainly all initial science undertaken on the islands assumed that life had been wiped out. But in later years this view was challenged, and severely.
* Less famed for its artistic quality than for the fact that it is the only known drawing depicting Krakatoa's pre-eruption botany.
† The expedition was in cheerless mood ever since Cook himself had been killed, in Hawaii, some months before.
* Southern Californians became briefly alarmed in the early autumn of 2002 when clouds of ballooning spiders wafted onshore from the Pacific. After the terrorist attacks of the year before, puzzling phenomena like this became suddenly invested with sinister overtones.
* More than twenty-four feet long, and a very powerful swimmer, easily able to reach the island from the mainland.
* These are in fact a kind of wasp.
* There is an early sepia photograph of a coconut's half-shell lying on an ash beach, with a stalk sprouting a leaf and rising from its upper side, a pale root feeling its way into what passes for earth (see illustration on p. 358).
* Backer had himself been at first easily and lazily convinced of the likelihood of total annihilation of all life. But then came evidence to the contrary – most notably, twenty-two years after the eruption, the discovery of a cycad, a plant that looks like a cross between a palm and a fern, which seemed much too large for something that had grown entirely from scratch. The idea that this might have been a survivor of the blasts set Backer thinking – and it ended up completely changing his mind.
* Although modern ecologists are still fascinated by and so still debate the question, a consensus appears lately to have emerged: that while perhaps some species did survive the cataclysm, rendering the Krakatoa relics less than totally sterile, there probably was not enough relic life to ‘mess up’ nature's experiment – conducted in full view of a fascinated world – in what was effectively true primary colonization and then the steady succession of the plants and animals that did that colonizing.
* It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suppose that one primitive life form could have survived the birth of Anak Krakatoa, and that is the kind of heat-loving bacteria that clusters around the hydrothermal deep-ocean sulphurous vents known as black smokers. These creatures, which are magnificently known as chemolithoautotrophic hyperthermophilic archaebacteria, are thought to be similar to the first life forms that were ever on this planet, which lived in the ancient seas of three and four billion years ago. None is known to have been found so far on Anak Krakatoa; and this part of the Sunda Strait remains too dangerous and unstable for the kind of submarine investigation that would be necessary to prove their existence clustered around old Krakatoa's still-active vents, if there are any.
† Dammerman's modesty and reticence are memorialized in a mollusc that he discovered, which is named Thiara carolitaciturni – one of the rare examples of a nomenclature honouring a persona rather than a person.
* Bristowe is perhaps the most famous figure in the spider world, known for calculating that the weight of insects devoured by British spiders in an average year exceeds the total weight of all British people combined.
* The Arthropoda is a vast division of the animal kingdom, and includes both spiders and insects.
* It is often the case, as here, that Indonesians have just one name. The prefix mas is simply an honorific, akin to ‘brother’, and is a way of describing and addressing one who is younger than oneself. Had Sikin been much older, he would have been deserving of the title bapak, or its more widely diminutive pak, meaning ‘father’.
* The Krakatoa archipelago is a detached part of the Ujung Kulon National Park, most of which includes the peninsula in Java to the south of the islands and known as Java Head. The one-horned Javan rhinoceros is plentiful in the park. One of the long-term benefits of the 1883 eruption has been the reluctance of a superstitious people to live and settle in large numbers anywhere near the volcano – a reluctance that has protected a very rare species from what would otherwise have been, in the face of population pressure, almost certain extinction.
* The formal end of Dutch rule came four years later, just after Christmas 1949. The August date is none the less the preferred time for celebration.
* In size and shape Anak Krakatoa looks much like one of its immediate successors, the island of Surtsey, off the south coast of Iceland. It was created in 1963, now has grazing animals and, perhaps in time, will have a human population too. There are even newer islands, however, all of them volcanoes: an island appeared near Iwo Jima in 1986, and the Japanese christened it Fukoto Kuokanaba; an islet near the Metis Shoal in Tonga's Vava'u Group appeared in 1995 and was named in honour of the then much favoured rugby international Jonah Lomu; and in 2000 an undersea volcano named Kavachi erupted in the Solomons – this may yet consolidate as the world's youngest island.
* Mr Kowalski directed some fourteen films and countless episodes of popular American television shows. Prior to Krakatoa, East of Java he made Bucket of Blood, Screaming Skull and Attack of the Giant Leeches; four years after Krakatoa he directed an epic, which presumably involved the activities of dangerous snakes, called Sssssss. The director is, however, not entirely responsible for siting the volcano at the wrong end of Java: his film was based on a book of the same name by an even more obscure writer named M. Avallone: it is to others we should look for matters of geographical exactitude.
* One of the pair wore a monocle, which made them highly caricaturable.