Decidedly Grim

Today’s Carbonized Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The biggest volcanic eruption ever recorded in human history took place nearly 200 years ago on Sumbawa, an island in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago. Mt. Tambora’s explosion was 10 times bigger than Krakatoa and more than 100 times bigger than Vesuvius or Mount St. Helens. Approximately 100,000 died in its shadow. An enormous cloud of gas released by the eruption created a veil over the earth. This resulted in the “year without summer” in 1816 when hundreds of thousands of people died due to famine and disease brought on by the markedly cooler temperatures. For more than two decades, Haraldur Sigurdsson, a volcanologist, has been gathering information from the Indonesian island. While he was digging, Sigurdsson discovered artifacts and remains carbonized when Tambora erupted. He calls his excavation site “The Lost Kingdom of Tambora” — a find he also refers to as “The Pompeii of the East.” “I have studied deposits in Pompeii and Herculaneum, from the great destruction of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. [It's] the same mode of destruction, the same mode of death. But [the] difference here [is] that the human remains are much more carbonized—almost entirely carbonized,” Sigurdsson says. “The bones are a piece of charcoal,” he says. That tells scientists that it was a much bigger explosion — with much higher temperatures. The explosion was hot enough to melt glass, and it happened so fast, Sigurdsson says, that people living on the island had no chance to escape. The carbonized remains of one woman recovered at the site confirm this. “She is lying on her back with her hands outstretched. She is holding a machete or a big knife in one hand. There is a sarong over her shoulder. The sarong is totally carbonized, just like her bones,” Sigurdsson says. “Her head is resting on the kitchen floor, just caught there instantly and blown over by the flow.”

Culled from: NPR

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