5 Acts of Nature That Rearranged the Face of the Planet

It's only natural that we tend to focus on the human side of earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters when they happen. But sometimes you have to step back and really appreciate the sheer, unfathomable scale of how these events can change the surface of the Earth itself. The world is a volatile place, and we'd do well to not let ourselves forget it.

With that in mind, consider the earth-shattering power of ...

In 1883, the island of Krakatoa in the Indian Ocean exploded like a potato in a microwave, except with less delicious Idaho goodness and with more tsunamis. The blast was so powerful that the noise could be heard from more than 2,000 miles away.

Obviously, this did not happen spontaneously -- islands don't randomly explode, or else no one would live on islands. This was the result of a volcanic eruption. Though scientists aren't sure what made the eruption trigger a full island explosion. One theory is that the lighter magma that usually spews out of a volcano mixed with heavier basaltic lava from below, and the island became the sealed bottle containing volcanic Diet Coke and Mentos.

Via Gweaver.net
Except spicier.

However it happened, the impact was huge. Unfortunately, there weren't many Johnny-on-the-spot photographers capturing the damage, since it was 1883 and an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and all. But we do have this illustration of Krakatoa before the eruption:

Via Wikimedia Commons

Aaaaand this one after:

Notice how the 90 percent of the mountain was no longer there. Where there was once an island halfway between Sumatra and Java, there was now three smaller islands and about 40,000 fewer people.

Via Wikipedia

Krakatoa's eruption was the loudest noise in recorded history, heard as far away as Perth, Australia. That's about 2,000 miles -- basically, imagine being in New York City, and hearing something that happened in Utah. You'd probably see it on the news long before you actually heard it since it takes sound nearly three hours to travel that distance.

The blast was the equivalent of 200 megatons of TNT. For perspective, the largest explosion ever made by humans was the detonation of a Russian hydrogen bomb, which was 50 megatons. That blast broke windows in buildings 560 miles away. Krakatoa was four times that; the cloud it generated wiped entire villages off the map 25 miles away and created a tsunami that traveled all the way to South Africa. That wasn't all Krakatoa's neighbors got for their birthday that year; giant pieces of rock and coral reef fell from the sky as well.

Via Wikimedia Commons
No really, "giant piece of coral reef" was literal.

Krakatoa ejected so much debris into the upper atmosphere that it changed the weather for five years. Much of what came out of the explosion was sulfur, which reached the stratosphere and reflected out more sunlight than regular water vapor, dropping the global temperature by just over 2 degrees. And since blowing up and drowning vast swaths of the planet wasn't a big enough screw you, it fell back to earth as rain -- acid rain.