Today, we are geologists! Join us for Volcanoes Part 4 - Krakatoa! Krakatoa was the first global disaster where the globe knew what was happening - erupting in 1883, telegraphs and undersea cables brought the news to the entire planet faster than previously imagined possible. Thousands died in the pumice, the fires, and most of all, the Tsunamis that ravaged the islands while the world waited for news in horror. But does that make us geologists? No, but this does! -- We also learn that we didn't know about Tectonic Plates until 1965!!!! Which is insane since that's the first thing you learn in Earth Science. More on Continental Drift, etc. in the episode! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: doomedtofailpod@gmail.com
Today, we are geologists! Join us for Volcanoes Part 4 - Krakatoa! Krakatoa was the first global disaster where the globe knew what was happening - erupting in 1883, telegraphs and undersea cables brought the news to the entire planet faster than previously imagined possible. Thousands died in the pumice, the fires, and most of all, the Tsunamis that ravaged the islands while the world waited for news in horror.
But does that make us geologists? No, but this does! -- We also learn that we didn't know about Tectonic Plates until 1965!!!! Which is insane since that's the first thing you learn in Earth Science. More on Continental Drift, etc. in the episode!
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
Geologist who was killed in Burkina Faso died while working job 'he loved': son | CBC News
Continental Drift versus Plate Tectonics
How Earth’s cooling molten core could destroy the planet - BBC Science Focus Magazine
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Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
hi Taylor how are you
good I I was telling you just like doing working on stuff but one thing that we did this today is Juan pulled up
a bunch of weeds in the yard and I've also had the worst allergies of my whole entire life so I've had a lot of allergy pills I'm like so
it's a little cloudy in here very good but it's very very stuffed in like here this area under my nose
hurts did not knock you out of those pills no you know what I need I need to talk
to a doctor of el repute because like I desperately want to sleep on airplanes I
can take like three allergy pills and three three dramamines and not fall asleep are you are you a nervous flyer
yeah but like why can't my body just take a bunch of drugs and fall asleep that'd be nice I can't sleep on planes
because I'm really big I'm always afraid that I'm gonna like kind of fart one time I was flying to um to bail and I
was on a plane and I fell asleep and I woke myself up by farting really loudly on the plane and I was like oh my God everybody looked at me and I was like
just never do this again sure that happens all the time I don't know how anyone I mean I'm 5'3 I don't know
anyone an inch taller than me is that goes on an airplane because I'm super uncomfortable and I know people who are
much taller than me who buy one of my friends at work he's like six four and he flew the other day in the middle seat
and I'm like oh my God it sounds [ __ ] terrible exit bro always the exit bro
that's the rule um cool well we'll just go ahead and kick things off welcome to dim the fail
our true crime slash History Podcast about things slash relationships that
we're doomed to fail I'm far as joined by Taylor and I think today is Taylor's
turn to go first it is Taylor's turn okay
so I'll tell you my drink and then we'll segue over to you
I'm gonna drink a big old glass of milk gross you understand why
they're good for you that's gross hey when I was a kid but I don't know I
can't imagine these days um cool well great mine is whiskey on
the rocks and the important part of that is rocks
because guess what I'm a geologist now from all the reading
that I did this week isn't that exciting is that touching on volcanologists or is
it it is I learned a lot about geology this week sweet because we're talking about a
volcano yeah um and I was also thinking like why didn't I study science in school
because then I'm like this is all so cool like I'm just like learning all this stuff this is awesome and then I actually I know someone who is a
geologist and they went to a wedding with their partner and their partner was this like
I don't know something was so off about her I was like talking to other people and I was like is she okay did she like
recently escape from a cult like what is going on like super weird and my husband
was like she's just a geologist foreign
I did science I was a biology major for maybe a semester in college before I
realized like it stops being cool and interesting and fun like real quick once you start getting into like the
nitty-gritty of like the chemistry of things and like the Deep science of it
well that was actually part of my question because like at what point when you study science do people start asking
you questions you know like I never got you know
I feel like that turning point is when you like become a scientist you know it could be or when you do peer review
papers I think one of the two yeah oh that's true when you're like in PhD school yeah that makes sense
um so I was like okay maybe people are getting sick of volcanoes because this is number four of the seven part Series
so we're like over the crescendo of the of the volcano talk um but then I was reading this book
called Krakatoa the day the world exploded and I said wow like 15 times in the while I was reading it so I'm super
interested I think it's still got some cool stuff that we can learn together so we're talking about Krakatoa which
erupted on August 27 1883. it's my birthday cool hey my events are August
27th too wait what year is yours 1883
minus 1883. mine's August 27th this is not August 27
1883. is it a volcano no but the events that's when it happened that's so weird
I don't believe you okay I'll tell you my story later then okay
keep going okay so when we're talking about Toba the one that it's the first one that erupted 70
000 years ago um I learned we learned a lot about human evolution remember different stages of band we all came from those
like 10 000 reading pairs all those things and just like we talked about human
evolution then this time we're talking about geology and the study of geology and rocks in the Earth and some of our
old friends pop up in the story as well that we've talked about in the past which is super delightful so we'll talk get to that
so reminder that there's levels of eruption there's a volcanic explosivity index and
each number up is double the one below it and so this one actually
um fills are list so we've hit one at five six seven and eight so all of them are
different levels of plinian which you also learns there's like Ultra Pliny and plenty in this kind of overlap with the
numbers beach number also has another fun adjective with it so number five is a cataclysmic
eruption that was a Vesuvius number six is a colossal eruption that's
Krakatoa we'll talk about today number seven is a super colossal ultraplinian that's Tambora that we talked about the
last time and then number eight is Mega colossal like Toba the first thing we talked about well this one's a six
um so just like Tambora and Toba this one is in Indonesia and
um where Krakatoa is located like if you're looking at Australia if you go to the east coast of Australia and go
straight up you're gonna hit Malaysia it's between Malaysia and Australia okay does that make sense
so picture it there the island of Krakatoa so it was like an island that had the volcano in the
middle it was part of a group of islands in that area it may or may not have erupted in the past
um in obviously something else probably happened in the millions of years that is not recorded but in recorded history
it could have it could have erupted anywhere between three and eleven times but like maybe two that way they can
actually kind of confirm with evidence there is a book called The Javanese book of Kings
which is a non-scientific history of the area written in the 19th century so kind of a lot of made-up stuff but in that
book the author said that there was an eruption in 416 A.D and it's hard because their calendar was different
than you know the Roman Calendar obviously so like it's a little bit weird to like juggle that around but in
that history they write that there was like a big bang and smoke in the air and all of those things
but there's no scientific evidence for that there is a little bit of evidence for an eruption happening in 535 A.D
which might be the one that he was talking about but just got the date wrong because because in China
for all of history since China's been able to write they've been taking notes about everything so there's a note in
535 A.D in China being like we just heard a big sound we don't know what it is so that could have been Krakatoa
um there's also an ongoing list of things that happened in like Java and
like Indonesia and this area that like the native people have been writing on for
a long time and something that happens culturally is like if you have
like a Record Keeper in town who's keeping records of like things like oh this year the crops were like this or
this year like whatever these people came in from the ocean all these things if you are um
if everything's going well you're gonna keep putting things in that book if everything is not going well you're gonna stop because you have to rebuild
your Society does that make sense like so did you stop doing history
yes because you literally all ever all of the houses got destroyed so you can't you take a break so in 416 there's
nothing happened they kept writing but in 535 they stopped writing for about two decades because maybe they were busy
fixing everything you know so that's that's the kind of evidence that we have that maybe it happened in 535 there's
another one in 1680 and we'll talk more about this this is like this is the Dutch East Indies
um so a lot of Dutch people in this story but a sailor named Johann Wilhelm Vogel arrived in 1679 to Sumatra then
went back to Batavia and Batavia is Jakarta which is the capital of Indonesia and he noticed that Krakatoa
was different than the first time that he went past it like that was a little bit like shorter and there was like smoke coming out of
it um a sailor told him there had been an eruption and they'd seen some like pumice you could see the smoke and there
were little earthquakes it was like a little bit of evidence that that happened but we don't know if there was like a huge eruption before the the big
one makes sense yes something probably happened so I'm not
100 sure there's a lot of disparate accounts we'll never know it is all circumstantial
yes but we knew it was like not a regular old Island we knew something was up but you know even but
like people knew what volcanoes were and they knew and they you know would explain it like you know there's a
really mean God on that island and you're like sure yeah there is like don't it's gonna it's mean
um it's like always kind of soaking so we know this is a dutchies Indies like I just said a little history of the area
obviously there's a big slave trade going through here um this is a little bit after the Mutiny on the Bounty but a little bit like kind
of in that same area um Captain Cook who is the captain that um was right before the Mutiny on the
body that knew the captain from the Bounty the one who was murdered in Hawaii remember that guy
explorers anyway he stopped at Krakatoa um and like had written about it before he was murdered in Hawaii and this is
also what they were what the Dutch were getting from this area a lot of it was spices and people have been getting
spices from Indonesia for almost a thousand years
um and bringing it back to Europe so pepper comes from this pepper is like one of the big spices that comes from this part of java and our friend Pliny
the Elder he in one of his encyclopedias when he wrote the first encyclopedia he said that the Roman Empire spends so
much on pepper that they're going to go bankrupt and then he later died in Mount Vesuvius it was kind of fun
is there more utility to pepper than a seasoning
so no but like imagine not having it so like this this is another thing have you
ever seen that Meme where white people find a bay leaf in their Chipotle and they freak out I had one but that sounds
right it's like people being like Oh my God I paid 15 for this salad and there's a
leaf in it like I'm gonna call Chipotle whatever and then people are like white people spent like thousands of years
colonizing the world for spices and these people don't know what a bait Leaf is
is is your position on this is that if you don't have pepper I mean you gotta buy a lot of pepper to
bankrupt the country yeah but if you don't have it like I don't know if you don't have any spices
like I don't know getting spices sounds really exciting obviously and like that's not my opinion that's like
colonialism yeah so
um so there's also a starting in like the 11th 11th century
there was a London Guild of peppers which is now the London Guild of Grocers it just sounds very British so like
we've always we've been thinking about Pepper for a very long time um but now it's the 1880s it's definitely Dutch in that area
um it's in in Jakarta they're doing things that they're building these big Dutch Bridges and
in the book that I read they said that the best painting that we have or visual we have of these Bridges is actually a
painting that van Gogh painted in aural where he was institutionalized of one of these big Bridges and you can see it if
you look it up it's called um it's called the langoli bridge in aural
l-a-n-g-l-o-i-s lingualoy I don't know whatever l-a-n-g-l-o-i-s
so yeah it's really pretty of course and so then
there's a lot of like there's a lot of slavery but there's also like mixed culturally there's
people from China there there's people from all over the world in this area it's a big Port area as we've learned over the years
um and it's run by the Dutch East India Company which you also have learned about so now I want to take
two side quests one into Evolution and two into tectonic plates
so first Charles Darwin who we know had a colleague named Alfred Russell Wallace
who was also figuring out the same thing at the same time so Darwin is in the Galapagos Islands Wallace is in
Indonesia near Jakarta in this area Wallace is actually the person who wrote
a letter to Darwin and like used the word survival of the fittest first so he was like figuring this out at the exact
same time he was a little bit more of like he's not as famous as Darwin obviously he was kind of like always like they
call him like the moon of Darwin because he's always like in his orbit they were like friends kind of but Darwin like took all the credit whatever that's
probably more complicated than I just said but you know what I mean but the basic idea is that they're looking at
islands and they're looking at like the plants and the animals and they're like well why is this here and why is that
there why does Australia have animals that nobody else has you know like why are some animals everywhere why are some
only in some places same with plants why does like why do Islands have similar vegetation
if they're separated so they're asking these questions and trying to understand like what could have caused this to
happen so part of their theory is they're like something has to be you know bringing
things between the islands in some way or something so that's kind of they're thinking about that and then much later
um there's a German scientist named Alfred vinegar and he was born in 1880 and he was looking at rocks the way
Darwin was looking at a live things like he was looking at the earth and the surface of the Earth in geology and he was like
have you guys seen the continents and the way they fit together like a puzzle and people were pissed they were like
[ __ ] you no he wrote a paper in 1915 and they like ostracized him in the
community they were like there's no way that's true the Earth is is fixed the people like the plates don't move
there aren't plates nothing moves everything is just the way it is you know and people were really really mad
um and then now there's I know you have not seen this but like now there's literally a children's movie called Ice
Age continental Drift about the continents drifting apart like I have seen like less than 100 years have you
seen it there's like seven of them one of them is actually called continental drift um talking about when that actually happened because now you learned that in
elementary school but we didn't we didn't accept that tectonic plates until 1965. no way which is Wilds
we flew to the moon before we accepted that theory biggest food is moving 68 but close
close enough okay fair enough that's wild yeah yeah like way recently like after our parents were born you know
something that we like definitely take for take for granted so we just like hadn't thought about
land moving so plate tectonics is telling us that the land is constantly moving which is both the ocean floor and
the Continental floor which is like the land we live on Continental Drift is continents um like maybe being Pangea
like one big consonant and then pulling apart you know yeah so
um in the 1960s people started to revisit Alfred vanguard's things like
his his um his hypotheses because they were given access to ground penetrating radar
because of the Cold War because they could say like oh yeah I know we have these guys up in Alaska studying the ground when really they're
listening for Soviet nuclear tests you know so it gives them the opportunity to
actually have these scientific discoveries there's also things that they're learning like in the Arctic there's something
this is complicated and I don't 100 have it but there's something where like when a rock is formed it like is
and it cools to like be a rock its magnetic field locks in to the way that
it was the day it was formed so when a rocket finally cools which is like solidifies and becomes a rock it's the
magnetic field of that rock will always Point North and South like you know the rock can move but like the
magnetic field and it will always point to the poles North and South so when they're looking at rocks in
different layers there are magnetic poles move which either means the poles
moved in history or the land moved you know I didn't know rocks had
magnetic poles they do anything on a rock on that way
no so then you have to like have a very special thing to find yes no it's not magnetic but they have like this like
registry inside of them Taylor as our um is our resident geologist what is the
very sophisticated thing you need to use to figure that out um
damn it that's my next that's in the next part of my PhD in geology I'll let you know so either either the the either
the poles moved or the ground moved and so it means the ground moved you know it's like the ground has shifted
um incidentally one of the scientists that was one of the top people to bring this tectonic plate idea in the 60s his
name was Dr s Keith runcorn he in 1995 when he was 73 he was murdered in his
hotel room in San Diego as part of a robbery he was just like about to speak about
geology that's like old nerd man um who's murdered which is sad um so anyway now people are like we
believe you science and we're learning about Titanic plates for the first time and it's 1965. so here's a couple things
vinegar yeah vinegar is a guy yeah he's the guy
w-e-g-e-n-e-r
Alfred he's the guy from um who wrote that paper in 1915 that everybody was mad about got it not the
guy who was murdered okay so here's a couple things that I learned
about plates there's oceanic plates that are the plates that are under the ocean like
the ocean floor when those bump into each other it creates Islands which we've seen so you
know underneath the ground there's like underneath the ocean there's like all those like mountains and stuff and they
grow as that moves and that makes an island there is there are continental plates so
that's like land land and when those hit each other they create huge mountains like Mount Everest huge right because
it's two like big plays hitting each other they create the Himalayas and like those big mountains
um the San Andreas fault that I live on is
the is a conservative plate boundary and in this case it's two continental plates not hitting each other it's like as
dramatically as like the Himalayas do but they're next to each other so in the book they described it as like a tire
against the curb when you're parallel parking right so that's what's happening here so it's creating like little
mountains and like little things like nothing like the Himalayas but then when that kind of like scooches and like the
pressure builds up that's when we have earthquakes over here but it's not going to create a volcano because the volcano is created by a
subject subduction zone which is when an ocean an ocean plate and a land plate
hit each other and the ocean plate is heavier because it's further down than the continental plate I like this is
what I'm using my hands so the ocean the ocean plate goes underneath the continental plate and then Parts the
continental plate kind of fall into it and that creates sort of that like hole that creates a volcano oh my God
that's as far as I got no no okay so so this stuff I I am like I've always been
infinitely fascinated with this stuff because it is like scales that orders of magnitude that is so hard for your brain
to even comprehend and wrap around but then I know but then you know you're joking about but you do the hand thing
you just say which nobody can see but like you do the hand thing and it's like oh it makes sense like if there's magma
in the middle of the Earth and then the only thing separating it is the crust of the earth and the crust the earth goes
up is creating a spout for magma to fall out of hence volcanoes I love it we both use our hands I think
I think we got it we are scientists damn it
exactly um oh another thing that I want to tell you is that the African continental
plate is slowly moving towards Europe and that's why like turkey has a lot of earthquakes because it's like right in
the middle of that spot makes sense which I thought was interesting um okay so now we know how volcanoes happen
they're in those um in those zones they are uh in those
subduction zones and now we're back to Krakatoa it's a volcano which we know so a little bit of
History again in this area in 1782 the Treaty of Paris made the
Dutch East India Company bankrupt Napoleon made his brother the king of Denmark because of course he did so
Napoleon's brother was like technically in charge of the area for a little bit but now it's the 1800s and people are
living on the island of Krakatoa they're living on the neighboring Islands they're living in Jakarta which is called Batavia at the time which is
about 100 miles away from Krakatoa and what makes this story different that I know I talked about last time
is when Tambora erupted in like 1815 there was no Global Communication now
there is so this is the first event that the whole world knew about basically at the
same time because it was the biggest disaster and we had telegraphs and we had underwater cables
um so in 1844 the first Telegraph message was
sent by Samuel Morse do you remember what he sent no what has God wrought oh there's no way I
was going to guess that I'm the only thing a knock knock joke Maybe no
um so by 1856 they have telegraphs and Jakarta so they have like a City Gas Works in 1870 they had their own ice
Works which I thought was fun because before that they had to import ice from Boston which sounds insane
like how do you get ice from Boston to Indonesia on a boat keeping it very cold
um there's a telephone so things are kind of like starting to happen pretty quickly and so it is
oh wait another thing just to tell you is that there's the telegraph which kind of goes through like the air and then
they have these Subterranean cables so the first one they laid broke but the second one that they lay in the early
1880s it works so you can quickly send a message from like Indonesia to like mainland China and like up to Malaysia
and like up to the rest of the world I literally they put a cable in the ocean which I know they do now but like it feels like a long time ago to do that I
always think that's crazy that is crazy
there's so much science involved in it and so it also was able to work the sub
Oceanic cables were invented and only able to work because of our rubber that was only
found in the Java area which is cool so like only if it's because of like Indonesia in this area found a rubber
plant that was able to put rubber around these cables and have that work so
we don't use those cables anymore it's been
do we have any undersea cables no because we have satellites I don't know
I'm looking at it right now wow man that's crazy what humans have done what humans really like me not me
I'm not I'm not ingenious yeah
and in a short amount of time so yeah anyway sorry can I pause can I
pause to read you a poem yes by Roger Roger Kipling about underwater
cables I love Kipling I love his later work okay ready yes
the wrecks the Rex solve above us their dust drops down from afar down to the
dark to the utter dark where the blind white sea snakes are there is no sound no echo of sound in the deserts of the
deep or the great gray level Plains of ooze where the shell bird cables creep
here in the womb of the world here on the Thai ribs of Earth words and the
words of men Flicker and flutter and beat mourning sorrow and gain salutation
and mirth for a power troubles the still that has neither voice nor feet they
have awakened the Timeless things they have killed their father time joining hands in the Gloom a league from the
last of the sun hush men talk today over the waist of the Ultimate slime and a
new world runs between them whispering let us be one
that's good yeah yeah you read it in a very mysterious way too which I help with the atmosphere I think
yeah I think the so now it's 1883. 1883 is a very wet
year um so it it's raining a ton there's always little earthquakes around this
area when people start to notice weird things a couple weeks before the actual eruption there's a captain who passes
Krakatoa and he's like it's a little dusty over there like the air is weird you know like we woke up in the morning
there was like a little layer of dust on the deck like we're not sure exactly what's happening
um there's a woman named Mrs vanderstock who loses a plate it falls off the wall and she reads that down because like
things are like the Windows start shaking at random times like just so the Earth feels
uncomfortable there's like a weird vibration in the air like everybody can feel and also another magnet thing like
magnets get messed up because there's iron in the ash that like is starting to come out of Krakatoa so that's messing
up like compasses and things like that because like messing up the air so it's just like feels weird around
um people start sending messages back to Europe being like something weird is happening um a fisherman said that he saw the
beach of Krakatoa on fire like like something something's going on hey I don't don't like animals know this [ __ ]
because they're like somehow tuned into like the magnet magnet you're gonna get to this aren't you they might I have a
story about this just okay but yes um exactly oh another thing that I learned in this book that I
um I forget exactly where it fits in but Julius reuter like of Reuters theme is
like one of the first people who was like a international like trying to get news across the world um he started with pigeons like having
like pigeons carry news um over long areas of time I guess a couple decades before this he was able
to get the news of the assassination of President Lincoln to the UK in 12 days so it's kind of fun however he did that
on like a fast boat um so yes to the animals do you remember when there was a little earthquake in
the in like the east coast and all the animals the DC zoo went nuts I remember was that weird no I was in New York what
happened and they just like started flying around weird and the monkeys start acting weird out all the animals start acting weird and they don't really
know why that happens um but it's the end of the summer it's near the end of the summer people are
trying to act like everything is normal um there's a circus in town in um in Jakarta and in the circus there's a baby
elephant and it's really freaking cute and it starts to kind of freak out
like they who knows but like maybe because of this and the woman who's in charge of baby elephant um brings it to
her room and it destroys the hotel room and the next day it like feels better so it like knew it was coming I don't know
if Dumbo saws anything it's that maybe it missed its mom oh
never watching the movie again so sad um so there's there's a masked ball the
night before um as well as people are trying to like they'll go to the circus they're having a good time they're trying to live their lives even though things are weird
at 1002 a.m on Sunday the 27th of August 1883 Krakatoa erupts it completely
destroys the island it was made of so like Vesuvius is still a mountain you know you can still like see it Krakatoa
is gone oh wow it's totally gone the island is totally gone 13 of the earth
vibrated like people felt it thousands of miles away they heard it thousands of
miles away um it was like something that like people recorded hearing you know just super far away and again like we saw
with Tambora they were like are we being attacked is this like cannons like what is this it's like it was one of the
loudest sounds ever recorded in the history of the world it went around the earth like seven times
somebody did a graph of like um Krakatoa the island like today or
like it's a picture of the island today and then it shows where the original Summit was and I'd say probably
two-thirds of it are gone give or take it's hard that's actually
that's not it that's a new island that's a new island wow okay
was totally gone so some things that happen obviously is
everyone on the island dies anyone that was like near it dies there's lightning in the clouds
people living on this yeah like around it like apparently the islands near it yes because also because
like volcanic islands are very Lush yeah
grow a lot of stuff there um so the ash goes like 24 miles up into the air hits the trade winds so then
that starts to go all over the world um the at 5 PM pumice starts to fall
which burns you know obviously Burns home homes and people um people all over the world are now
hearing about this and they're also keeping track of the weather so we talked about this the last time with
Tambora where like we didn't know the weather people would just ask the oldest person they knew you know right has it
always been like this in June you know and like Thomas Jefferson was one of the first people to write down the weather like a daily and Benjamin Franklin was
like maybe it's a volcano like these guys were just thinking about this stuff all the time but so we have a lot of
logs of the weather all over the world after Krakatoa erupted because victorians would like write it down in
their Diaries it was like a thing to do during that time um so we we know that like in England
there were brilliant sunsets so there's an artist named church one named Ashcroft who did some beautiful watercolors probably the Scream by Munch
was inspired by the sunsets yeah and um
people could hear the sounds from thousands of miles away but
um we knew what it was because it was the first time there was like Global News and people like knew it was happening pretty quickly
so Krakatoa is the most deadly volcanic eruption that we have on
our list um the Dutch said the death toll was 36 417 but it's estimated it could be up to
120 000 people died and a lot of them died because of the tsunami that came afterwards
so obviously it like messed up the ocean and then there was a tsunami um it killed a lot of people recently
there like there when it just happened um the water rushed so fast that like
in England Charles Darwin's son was um like keeping track of the weather and
he noticed a little like blip in the water like England you know like there was
like a little bit of like a little bit of like a four inch higher tide in in like Europe than usual yeah
first question is probably not answerable what what okay so do the math on like why is it that one eruption is
so much bigger than the other all it comes down to is pressure and the ability for that pressure to alleviate
itself so does that imply that a like for example Krakatoa the reason it was
so powerful is because the pressure built longer because maybe the way the plates collided were denser
and stronger and couldn't erupt sooner maybe I have no idea yeah yeah I figured
up and I wonder if like the the depth maybe it's like the depth of like the
of like how far down it goes like maybe it goes like further into the core than like other ones maybe maybe a mantle and
a core oh God um but I mean it's a good question
um and then also like Tambora was technically higher on the scale but it
was mostly the um atmospheric atmospheric effects that
made Tambora so deadly because um it was because it was so big you remember talking about this if it had
been like a smaller eruption than like the um like the way that like the light
reflected off the ash like made it worse right yeah yeah I can't remember but you know what I mean so there's that too so
um there are tons of reports of people across the coast of Africa and along the
Indian Ocean finding just like huge pieces of pumice stone like up to like a
year or year or two later um coming up on the beach filled with skeletons of people and animals because
like they people would get killed in the pumice and it would just get like swept off to Sea there's a lot of people who
died that way um there's the summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere fell by the
average of like one degree which like in the terms of
climate change and thinking about that like a one degree change like if it's like 70 to 69 who cares but if it's
freezing to if it's not freezing to freezing then like people die you know what I mean like
that degree is a big difference so um one story of a family that uh that did
survive they were the bionic families they were in anher which is a port town that was very close to Krakatoa Mrs
byernick was like things are weird like things have been weird for a few weeks um that morning she asked to go to her
country house which was up on a mountain and her husband was like no we're fine let's stay here in town he went down to the beach and he saw the ocean begin to
swell he saw that like pullback like that weird thing the ocean does where he knows like the tsunami is coming so them and their servants probably that
probably the whole thing that wasn't great they started running up this hill to get to their Cottage and it was like
Pitch Black in the middle of the day there's pumice coming down they're all burned she's in her thing she looks on
her arms and she sees that they're dirty and she tries to wipe off the dirt but it's her skin it's her burnt skin they're just like and they're running in
like some of her you know servants get there some of them don't but their whole actual house is totally destroyed but
they they do survive but be able to climb that hill and hiding in that in that house um but it was just like obviously a
horror show um there's chaos you know there's loud booms for almost 20 hours
um the tsunami you know is seen everywhere um by the Fall a couple months later the
atmosphere in New York was changed that firefighters the Poughkeepsie thought that there was a fire and they kept looking around trying to find a fire and
they couldn't find one because it was just like the atmosphere was like red you know like brilliant Sunset it's like
totally different um colors like we know um so after this happened obviously there's a
ton of cleanup a lot of people are dead a lot of people are you know just like destroyed in many different ways
um the native population of this area is and was mostly Muslim and they started
to become more devout and believe that maybe their God was punishing the white people for
but the Dutch for being there not that there aren't white Muslim people but you know like the Dutch for being there and in 1888 there was a peasants Revolt in
the Bonton region it started with a stabbing of a Dutch politician and that led to some changes in that area so
that's kind of happening between like the 1880s and like the 1900s there's a bunch of unrest in the area like
politically but in the meantime in 1930 there's an island that appears where
Krakatoa used to be um there were a couple little islands
that came up between um then in 1930 but they kept kind of going back into the ocean they didn't pop up very long but the one you see
right now is called anak krakatau which means the son of Krakatoa no and it's
really cute it was so cute and yeah and it's also cool because it's a new island
and so we can go back to thinking about Evolution and like what grows on a new
island what animals are on a brand new island like it was an opportunity to be like what is the first thing here so
guess what the first thing that this first animal they found on the island cockroach spider
well I like spiders um there's a little spider and I don't like like spiders but this is so cute
they think he got there on like a little parachute like he made his little his little yeah
spiderweb yeah into a parachute he like parachuted under the island yeah and was
like I'm gonna leave it by myself so I feel hopefully hopefully he had a good life
um than other animals are to comment it's like how they get there so either from like being like maybe like they
floated over on like it's pumice or a log people went there to try to like watch the new vegetation
and see what was going to happen and of course they brought rats so there's rats in the island now um those came definitely from people
um but you know some of the seeds might come from like you know bird poop pest seeds in it maybe that's how they got there but it's like it's been an
opportunity to be like what happens if we start from nothing what happens and so they're like you know is it stuff
like under the pumice maybe there's still seeds maybe there's still this like underneath these things we don't
know so it's interesting um other things that I learned about that area that I just hadn't gotten this
far yet um is that the Dutch actually remained in control of um
of Indonesia until the 1940s when the Japanese invaded in World War II and
um Indonesia got its independence in 1945 after World War II was over awesome
I just didn't know that um so that's it it's a really big one and here's the things that I feel like I
my three big takeaways is I learned well I didn't say these things yet
hold on I learned about subduction zones which is like the ocean plate hitting
the continental plate and creating that volcano because of the pressure we learned about that I learned about tectonic plates and that that's a
relatively new thing I also learned that other as far as we know other planets don't have
continental drift and tectonic plates weird I wonder why like there might be
one of the moons of like Jupiter might have them but they don't have oceans right that's a big part of it but like I
Think We're Alone in that potentially actually wait what makes the continent drift is it the waves of the ocean
it's just like they're constantly moving from like pressure from the core
so it's not the ocean it's like the core is pressure up moving around so it's like the the
oceanic plate is moving and the continental plate is moving um because they're always kind of like
being agitated by the core and the whole reason they're being agitated by the core this is it's so scary this is my
I'm going to end on a real scary thing this is the third thing I learned that that's happening from the core
because the core is cooling so as the core cools it has to have that pressure and the pressure is released by moving
around the plates by volcanoes by like things like that that we see and what's going to happen eventually is the
earth's core is gonna just cool and then that's it then what happens the Earth is over did
everything will die yeah but then by then yeah isn't the Sun supposed to explode too though
yeah totally I don't know which one's gonna happen first isn't like another galaxy supposed to absorb our galaxy
well like our our galaxy is like always growing the wheat there's like a special
point this is that I sometimes we watch YouTube videos about that scares me where like it ends and we can never go
any further but but the Galaxy kids getting pulled out that way I don't know this is it's a lot more
existential than you think it would be I think it's just a volcano exploding but then you're like no it's like scientific discoveries and it's trying to figure
out what's going on and it's like understanding that it's not a god understanding that it's the Earth but also is that more terrifying that the Earth is like
doing all those crazy things inside the core and it's something you learn in elementary school but you don't I don't think about it as like
scarily as it is as I do now wait so now I'm scared so
so what uh uh what
right 2.8 years from now the surface temperature of the earth will have
reached 300 degrees Fahrenheit no 2.8 billion
oh so so and then the core is Cooling
poor Cooling I hope someone uses this as like you can
put us in your bibliography for your project at school yeah oh God
it's cooling faster than previously thought cool cool cool cool cool cool cool
um how Earth's cooling molten core could destroy the planet BBC Science Focus
I'm gonna take some deep breaths I agree wait solidification of the outer core
um the inner core is expected to consume most or all of the outer core 3.4 or
three to four billion years from now resulting in almost completely solidified core composed of iron and other heavy elements
the surviving liquid envelope will mainly consist of lighter elements yada yada
the entry will cool less efficiently which would slow down or stop the
Intercourse growth in either case this can result in a loss of magnetic Dynamo
the limit magnetic field of the earth will decay in 10 000 years
it'll cause a I don't know what any of this means yeah
well anyway it's a lot um
surely the sun is gonna grow to a level where it will consume the Earth because
it'll get so big it's all the its red giant phase I didn't know that I didn't know that you learned that inexplicably when you
were a kid they teach you that which I don't even want to know now because like is that tomorrow I just
like doing one thing about it it kind of makes everything futile doesn't it like why are we even doing anything
like why why everything's score right now like who cares literally nothing matters yep
dope dope three more volcanoes to go
not that it matters not that any of this matters but yes not that it matters I
know a lot more about volcanoes than I did a year ago we're all gonna die in a horrible flame somehow somehow
um so cool that's all I got do you have any do you have anything you
want to read out um I did but I can't remember what it is I don't have any listener mail
um oh I did want to say my friend Elizabeth has been listening and um she's very cute and she was like I've been yelling along with you guys and
she's like I've been acting like you're just in my house with me talking to me so I thought that was very nice
um and yeah that's all I got for now