Krakatoa

My wife and I discovered the show about Krakatoa this past weekend, and we watched it over the course of two nights on the DVR. Absolutely mind-blowing. (Click the title to see the Discovery page about it.)

You cannot comprehend the sheer scale of the eruption and the catastrophe that follows, though the show did a good job of bringing it to a human level. Almost too good - there's one scene where a baby is basically burned to death that would touch all but the hardest of hearts, and for sure make any parent's worst fears rise to the surface. I have a hard time watching stuff like this now that I'm a dad, but we were transfixed by the whole program, beginning to end. They did a nice job of mixing the historical fiction scenes, with extremely good acting by known actors, with science sequences that explained what happened and how, to the best of our knowledge. I mean, this whole thing happened 120+ years ago, so there's precious little in the way of authoritative documentations. Videos or stills would have been nice! Still, there's a lot to go on, and they filled in the gaps nicely. It was the loudest sound ever heard. Think about that. Two thousand miles away in Australia, they heard it. At close range, it was over 180 DB. The wiki page about it is a good source of info too. I highly recommend you read about it.

The scary thing is, this could happen again. Anytime. And unlike the tsunami, if you're caught in the pyroclastic flow of a major eruption, there's nowhere to run.