How Krakatoa made the biggest bang
It was 6am on August 26 in 1883, when the volcano on Krakatoa, a small island in Indonesia, catastrophically erupted. This earth-shattering event became the greatest natural disaster of the 19th century: the sky was bathed in an unearthly red glow and the fallout was felt around the world.
The force of the eruption created the loudest noise ever recorded: it was heard 4,653km away on Rodriguez Island in the Indian Ocean and some 4,800km away in Alice Springs; shock waves travelled around the world seven times; and the force of the blast was some 10,000 times greater than that of the hydrogen bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The volcano left 36,000 people dead and the survivors battled to cope with tsunamis, further eruptions and superheated ash clouds.
As the volcano erupted, a plume of ash swept 80km into the sky, the hot gas became unstable and raced across nearby islands at 150km. "Those who weren't killed by the intense heat," says Dr Dave Rothery, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Open University, "would have been sandblasted to death. It was hot enough to carbonise everything in its path."
The real killers, though, were the giant tsunamis that were unleashed, reaching heights of 40m and which were so violent that they flung sections of coral reef ashore, some weighing as much as 600 tons. Like the Indonesian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, these tsunamis destroyed everything in their path.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-krakatoa-made-the-biggest-bang-476616.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
After I had posted this I looked to see what time it was BBC on Sunday here in the UK. Couldn't find it and checked back in the article only to discover its dated 2006. Not sure why it was reposted in The Telegraph yesterday. 
The subject fascinates anyway.
