Week 4 - Samuel O'Connell (Mount Tambora)

For this week of travels, I ventured to Mount Tambora, located on one of the Sundra Islands of Indonesia. This volcano is the source of the largest recorded eruption in human history, so I learned from the locals. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora has a rough estimate of killing over 90,000 people, and spread 12 cubic miles of gases, ashes, dust, and rock. In turn, this is thought to have caused "the year without a summer", during which crops withered and died, food was scarce, and the weather was abnormally cold. 

As I learned from my local guide when visiting the area, Tambora is known as a stratovolcano, and I informed him that is also called a composite volcano. A stratovolcano is usually formed from highly viscous silica-abundant magma and andesite. Tambora's most prominent feature is it's caldera, which is the circular-funnel shaped depression that is larger than one kilometer. In Tambora's case, the caldera measures about 6 kilometers.

The locals told me that several years back, earthquakes were quite frequent, and it was predicted that the volcano could erupt again soon, as Tambora formed at a convergent plate boundary. This means that the volcano is part of a larger chain of a volcanic arc along the plate boundary. The local people don't know how big the eruption could be, but more than 800 million people currently live within 60 miles of Tambora. 




Sources:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blast-from-the-past-65102374/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/rumblings-within-indonesias-mount-tambora-volcano-could-eruption-bring-year-without-summer/2011/09/22/gIQAyEUMqK_blog.html