Krakatau
	The Son Also Rises
	By Simon Elegant | Anak Krakatau

Posted Monday, December 12, 2005; 20:00 HKT
The black cone looms out of the sapphire waters of the Sunda Strait, its base ringed by a circle of green trees and foliage that manage to thrive on the rich soil despite intermittent eruptions. Though only around 500 meters high, no one among a group of recent visitors is underestimating this volcano's potentially lethal temper. The reek of sulfur from escaping gases is heavy in the air, and boulders the size of cars are littered about its gravelly slopes, evidence of past detonations. Cahya, an Indonesian government geologist visiting the island to help install monitoring gear, warns against a climb to the crater: "A tourist went up a few years ago and had his head taken off by a small eruption. It even happens to us geologists. Two of my colleagues and some Americans were killed in Java some years ago. You never know when a volcano is going to get angry."

Caution is sensible around any volcano but this one bears a particularly notorious name: Anak Krakatau—Child of Krakatau. It's the offspring of the most famous of the 129 volcanoes strung along the same 3,000-km fault line that produces earthquakes and tsunamis like the one that devastated Aceh a year ago. This child is little more than half the size its parent had reached when it blasted itself out of existence in 1883, an explosion so loud it was heard as far as Bangkok, Perth and even Rodriguez Island off the coast of Africa, some 4,800 km away. For nearly 50 years after that massive detonation—which spawned a tsunami that left some 36,000 dead—there was nothing but water where the 800-meter volcano had once stood. Then in 1928, amid hissing, bubbling and rumbling, a stretch of rock poked up above the surface. It has been growing ever since and still rises by more than six meters a year. At its current rate Anak Krakatau will match its famous parent sometime around the year 2050.

While earthquakes and tsunamis are a grim reminder of nature's awesome power and destructiveness, volcanoes can be even deadlier. By historical standards, the eruption of Krakatau in 1883 was little more than a firecracker. When Toba volcano in north Sumatra blew 73,000 years ago, it left a crater 80-km wide and produced a storm of dust and stone that left deposits 1.5 meters thick hundreds of miles away. The debris blocked the sun's rays and sent global temperatures plunging, helping to trigger the ice age that some scientists believe brought humankind to the brink of extinction.

With so many active volcanoes to monitor, Indonesia's Department of Vulcanology and Disaster Mitigation is stretched thin. But its officers take their jobs seriously. On the east tip of Java, Sikin sits in a two-room bungalow overlooking the Sunda Strait. When the weather is clear, he can just about make out the cone of Anak Krakatau 50 km away. As he has done for the past 21 years, Sikin keeps his eyes fixed on the fat roll of paper on which a single needle is scratching out signals sent by an array of seismic sensors positioned around the volcano. At the first sign of a major tremor, he will telephone the Department's head office in Bandung where a decision will be taken on whether to issue a warning to the roughly 300,000 people living in the vicinity. When Sikin is sleeping on the cot in the back room, a colleague monitors the seismometer. It doesn't do to turn your back on a volcano.

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