THE LOVE SPELL POTENTIAL: THE BIGGEST BANGS IN HISTORY

In “The Love Spell Potential,” Season 6, Episode 23, a dragon falls from the sky and crashes into a volcano.

“The globe of this earth . . . [is] . . . not just a machine but also an organized body as it has a regenerative power.”

—James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788)

“The Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood, and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.”

—Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

Those Big Bangs in Fiction and Fact

Little wonder Howard and Sheldon come across a volcano in their game of Dungeons and Dragons. The mighty power of a volcano is just the kind of thing you’d expect to see in fantasy scenarios. After all, the volcano of Mount Doom in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legendarium was the only power strong enough to destroy the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings series. No doubt the odd dragon can breathe fire, but just think of the dramatic havoc a volcano can bring to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Volcanos can turn your terrain for miles around into a mass of smoke and fire, while smearing out the sun and swiftly turning ocean shorelines black with ash.

Huge volcanic eruptions aren’t even fantasy. There’s plenty of factual drama to draw upon, and even the odd reference to a dungeon. Here’s a choice pick of the volcanoes that made the most famous and dramatic blasts in history.

Mount Pelée, Martinique, Caribbean Sea: May 8, 1902

First came the bugs. No dragons to speak of, as was the case with Howard’s volcano. In Martinique in 1902, it was just yellow ants and big, black centipedes, mostly. They crawled and clambered down the lush-covered slopes of Mount Pelée and scuttled through the streets. Then came the snakes. Their slow exodus slithered down the volcano’s sides, a bit like a biblical plague. Animals are often the first to sense that something big is coming, while we mere humans remain oblivious. Last came the explosion. Mount Pelée blew its top, forcing out a huge cloud of glowing gas at more than 100mph. Three minutes later, almost all of the people of the local town, St. Pierre, lay suffocated and burned to death. Only one person survived: a prisoner in the city’s dungeon, Auguste Ciparis. After surviving four days stuck down in his dungeon, buried beneath layers of ash, Auguste Ciparis was set free only to spend the rest of his days touring with a circus—as an exhibit in a replica of his dungeon!

Perbuatan, Krakatoa Island, Indonesia: August 26, 1883

It was the loudest explosion in written history. When Krakatoa erupted, the sound was heard three thousand miles away. That’s like living in Oregon and hearing a bang in Florida. Krakatoa first blew up and, on the following day, collapsed in four gigantic explosions. The shockwaves were felt around the world. The energy of the eruptions was ten thousand times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Scholars believe around one hundred thousand people died. Some in the surrounding area, and many more drowned by the enormous tsunamis unleashed by the volcano’s collapse. As the volcanic dust flew fifty miles into the Earth’s atmosphere, it cast a curtain about the globe that conjured up chaotic weather and fabulously scarlet sunsets. In London, the sky was so fiery red that people called out fire engines. And the ashy atmosphere also made the Sun and Moon turn blue or green.

Incidentally, the Krakatoan eruption is thought by some scholars to be related to The Scream, the famous series of paintings and pastels by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose iconic creations show a figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a tumultuous red-orange sky. In an article titled “When The Sky Ran Red: The Story Behind The Scream,” in the February 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, Donald W. Olson, an astronomy and physics professor at Texas State University, along with colleagues Russell L. Doescher and Marilynn S. Olson, tells how the group traveled to Oslo, Norway. Once there, they were able to pinpoint the precise location where the artist stood as he “felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature,” moving Munch to put his feelings on canvas. Their analysis of The Scream, which includes relevant quotes from Munch’s journals and topographic analysis, presents proof that clearly connects Munch’s fiery blood-red Norwegian sky and spectacular twilight to the explosions of Krakatoa, which had erupted an air travel distance equal to 6,788 miles away.

Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, Italy: August 24, 79 AD

The day before the eruption, the Romans had celebrated Vulcanalia, a festival in honor of the god of fire. The following day, a volcanic explosion was recorded by one single survivor, the famous Roman writer, Pliny the Younger. Pliny was witness to a cloud of hot ash, which was blasted from Mount Vesuvius a full twenty miles into the sky, a third of the way into outer space. But soon gravity got its grip, and the cloud began its descent back down to Earth, raining toxic gas on the town and its people, burying them in ash up to nine feet deep. Many thought that the end of the world had come. The blast happened so quickly that Pompeii and its people were perfectly preserved until the eerie scene was once more uncovered in 1748.

As Pliny described the event later in his letter to Roman Senator Tacitus, “Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. ‘Let us leave the road while we can still see,’ I said, ‘or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.’ We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”

Pliny’s description is still highly regarded today by volcanologists. In the nineteenth century, many scholars believed Pliny to be wrong in his account, associating volcanoes only with lava-like eruptions. But the eruption of Martinique in 1902 made geologists realize that Pliny was right all along: volcanoes could also erupt with superhot and pyroclastic flows of dust and ash.

Tambora, Sumbawa Island, Indonesia: April 10, 1815

Tambora was the largest eruption ever recorded, and one of the largest eruptions in the last sixty-odd thousand years. The explosion killed more people than any other volcano, releasing millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The effect on the immediate area was clear and devastating. What was less well known until recently was the effect Tambora had on global weather, and arguably global events. The veil that shrouded the planet, and blocked sunlight, led to the following year of 1816 becoming known as the year without a summer across Europe and eastern America. Storms in June and July, along with unseasonal frosts, inspired creative imaginations. But devastated crops brought more hunger to a Europe short of food and work, as it struggled to recover from the Napoleonic Wars.

Volcanologists have a technical term for eruptions of this scale and size: colossal. The measure is in part an estimate of the volume or the mass of pumice, lava, and ash that have been ejected during an eruption. Tambora weighs in with a magnitude of 7, which means around thirty-six cubic miles of pumice and ash were ejected. That’s enough to cover the whole of the United Kingdom, or the state of Michigan, about knee-deep in volcanic debris. This amount of material is about a hundred times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, and a thousand times bigger than the eruption in Iceland in 2010 of Eyjafjallajökull, which caused so much disruption to aviation.

This truly colossal event probably began with an episode of unrest lasting two or three years. So, from about 1812, there are indications that the volcano was becoming a bit lively, but no one had recognized Tambora as a potentially active mountain. Then, on the fifth of April in 1815, an eruption happened that was a pretty large explosion in its own right. The shape of things to come. The explosions and detonations of this first eruption were heard across Indonesia within a range of hundreds of miles and probably beyond. There are historical accounts of the eruptions, as so often happens in such cases, where people at first believe they’re under siege from the sea, with cannons being fired at them. The detonations sound close at hand, even though they are five hundred or a thousand miles away, so troops or navy are dispatched, to little avail.

Once truly under way, Tambora underwent its colossal explosions, which ejected the huge quantities of ash and pumice mentioned earlier. But remember, there’s also a lot of thermal energy, so the volcano’s cloud of ash climbed up and up into the very stratosphere, producing the kind of towering column we now expect from such large eruptions. The ash was behaving a little like a hot air balloon, buoyant from all of that thermal energy, so all of the air that’s entrained into this ash column heated up and simply lifted the ash column up to heights two or three times the height of commercial aviation.

By the 10th of April 1815, the eruptions were so colossal that the material produced failed to become fully airborne. Instead, the pumice and hot ash cascaded back down onto the flanks of the volcano, forming ground-hugging hurricanes of debris that incinerated everything within a radial path twenty miles or so around the volcano. After a full five days of such eruptions, sending scalding gas to the edge of space itself, the top half-mile of the mountain, along with the souls who had lived on its flanks, had vanished.

Migration of Man Supervolcano: Toba

Tambora leads us nicely to one of the greatest supervolcanoes in history. The volcano is called Toba, and it’s in Indonesia. Scholars believe that around seventy thousand years ago, Toba suffered a gargantuan explosion. Scholars say the Toba eruption was “megacolossal,” much, much bigger even than the eruption of Tambora. The Toba explosion is thought to have dumped three inches of debris—a layer that can still be seen—on all the lands of South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian and South China Seas, a truly huge area of land. With so much ash and dust in the air, the sun was dimmed for many years. The affected land would have become like a giant ashtray, with cubic miles of ash clogging rivers and streams, and seasonal rains would have stopped. Not only does that sound like a superb start to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but it may also happen to be one of the reasons the actual story of human migration began.