Tambora, Conqueror of the Nearly (Forgotten) World

Krakatau. That is the spontaneous response of most of us when presented with the question of what volcano is the greatest eruption throughout history. A small number may respond with Lake (Mountain) Toba, as the unfolding of some amazing new facts behind the beauty of Lake Toba. The eruption of Mount Toba was the greatest eruption in the last 27.8 million years. Yet it happened 74,500 years ago or far beyond the recorded historical period.

^{Mt. Tambora Sumbawa Indonesia.wikipedia}

No one doubts the magnitude of the eruption of Krakatau 1883. The tiny volcano in the Sunda Strait spewed no less than 20 cubic kilometers of volcanic material. Some of them are exhaled up to 40 km into the atmosphere. If all of it is considered dust-shaped and we pour it into the DKI Jakarta area while solidified in such a way, then the whole area will be immersed in a 30-meter-high pile of sand. But the most remembered of Krakatau is the tsunami. The collapse of almost the entire body of the mountain as the enormous eruption to form the caldera under the sea accompanied by heated clouds of heat in a very large amount. The immediate effect was the tsunami, which galloped to both sides of the Sunda Strait and when it crashed into the coast even up to 37 meters high as it did in Merak. The victim of the life he took was huge. The Dutch colonial government recorded 295 villages and towns destroyed by the tsunami with an official death toll of 36,417. But the death toll in unofficial calculations is greater, perhaps even touching 120,000.

^{Current topography of Sumbawa.wikipedia}

However, Krakatau 1883 is not the most powerful eruption, both for Indonesia and the world. Nearly two centuries ago last year, precisely in April 1815, another volcano that also existed in Indonesia erupted with a much greater scale of awesomeness. The volume of volcanic material spewed eight times larger than Krakatau 1883. So much dust is spread to the sky so that he is able to create chaos of weather in all corners of the Earth's surface to have a major impact on our civilization. No wonder this eruption is referred to as one of the world's changing eruptions. Until the year 2013, this volcanic eruption was the largest volcanic eruption on Earth in the last 26,500 years since the rampage of Mount Taupo (New Zealand), before then the latest research shows the eruption of Mount Rinjani (also in Indonesia) around 1258 was larger.

^{The estimated volcanic ashfall regions during the 1815 eruption. The red areas show thickness of volcanic ash fall. The outermost region (1 cm (0.39 in) thickness) reached Borneo and Sulawesi.,wikipedia}

That is Mount Tambora. To imagine what it looks like, let's imagine that we are the rulers of the world and picking up one nuclear warhead hidden all over the current nuclear nation. We collect them all in one place and then blown together. The energy of the 1815 Tambora Eruption is still greater than the strength of the entire nuclear explosion. If you can not imagine, let's imagine we are faced with the horror of a nuclear bomb that devastated the city of Hiroshima (Japan) on August 6, 1945, ago. For human size, this explosion is already very large. But not so for the volcano. Collect 1,350,000 nuclear bombs identical to the Hiroshima nuclear bomb and blast all in one location at the same time. Then we will get the same energy scale as Tambora 1815 eruption.

If so powerful, why the eruption of Tambora 1815 is not as popular as Krakatau 1883? One of the answers is that this eruption occurred in a 'wrong' time frame in the history of mankind. The new global telecommunications system was created more than 60 years after the eruption of Mount Tambora, in the form of a telegraph based on Morse code text (not sound). For us today, this communication technology is both antique and primitive. But for the past 1.5 centuries, the telegraph was the most advanced means of communication of its time that enabled humans in various quarters to exchange information, as well as gossip. Only a few weeks after the global telegraph network is connected via a marine cable system, Krakatoa erupts violently. So the information eruption quickly spread. Conversely, when Mount Tambora erupted, the speed of information dissemination was so slow that the earliest news of the eruption had just arrived in London (UK) more than six weeks later.

Caldera

Prior to 1815, Mount Tambora was the highest mountain in the entire island of Sumbawa whose peak soared to a height of about 4,000 meters above sea level (sea water) or more. So high that he was clearly visible from the east coast of Bali island even though the place is 300 km more than the mountain. The mountain that seemed to be nailing the earth island of Sumbawa. In the record of the Global Volcanism Program of the Smithsonian Institution, the last and most extensive eruption of Mount Tambora occurred around 740 referring to radioactive carbon dating.

^{On the floor of Tambora's caldera, looking north,wikipedia}

All changed dramatically in April 1815. A colossal eruption caused the peak of Mount Tambora to be trimmed so that its height was reduced to 2,850 meters above sea level. Not only that, now the peak was changed with a giant crater (caldera) about 7 km in diameter with a maximum depth of 1250 meters, making it the deepest caldera in the entire Earth. Later, a small part of the base of the caldera is flooded with rain, especially on the southwest side. The puddle is called Lake Motilahalo, which roughly has a length of 800 meters, a width of 200 meters and a maximum water depth of 15 meters. Fenced in by towering candle walls, Motilahalo's lake has no drainage channels as well as rivers or the like. So that the water can only leave the lake by evaporating or seeping into the body of the mountain. While on the north side of the base of the caldera stands a cone of the mountain Tambora children who nicknamed Doro Api Toi. This cone appeared post-1815, precisely in the eruption of 1830, and is now rising as high as about 100 meters from the base.

Tambora Caldera formed when 160 cubic kilometers of volcanic material spewed out this volcano in a powerful eruption between 5 to 15 April 1815. Compared to Krakatau 1883 which 'only' issued 20 cubic kilometers, clear volcanic eruption Tambora 1815 eight times more. If everything is considered dust-shaped and poured into the area of Jakarta and compacted in such a way, then almost all provinces are also the capital of Indonesia will sink under a heap of 242 meters thick. There are only 2 tops of skyscrapers that are still visible, namely Ciputra World Jakarta (257 meters high) and Wisma 46 (250 meters high).

If the average temperature of magma when right out of the bowels of the earth is considered at 850 degrees Celsius, then the thermal energy released in the 1815 Tambora Eruption is 27,000 megatons of TNT. This is still greater than the amount of potential energy stored in all nuclear warheads on Earth at the height of the Cold War in the past 3 decades, the 'only' 20,000 megatons of TNT. If we compare it with the explosion of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, which 'only' energized 20 kilotons of TNT, it is clear that the energy of Tambora 1815 Eruption is 1.35 million times bigger.

Most of the Tambora volcanic material was flung to the north-west of the mountain. The hot clouds dump an area of up to 874 square kilometers in the vicinity, resulting in a rocky deposit, gravel, and hot sand as thick as 7 meters on average. So much the volume of Tambora's hot clouds so that some even reach the coast of the Flores Sea and continue to flow into the ocean, creating a tsunami. Tsunami is galloped with speeds up to 250 km / h and hit the coast of northern East Java with a height of 1 to 2 meters and the coast of Maluku with a height of 2 meters or more. If the height of the tsunami in both places is extrapolated to know the height of the tsunami on the north coast of Sumbawa island, then it is estimated that the height reaches more than 4 meters.