From the Blurb: On August 26 and 27, 1883, the island volcano Krakatau erupted, ejecting more than four cubic miles of debris and creating a huge plume of gas and ashes that rose to an altitude of thirty miles. Spectacular, fiery sunsets resulted, lighting the skies of North America and Europe in the following months. This was one of history's most terrifying and destructive volcanic eruptions. Great sea waves crested to heights of 118 feet, crashing on the coasts of Java and Sumatra and killing more than 30,000 people. The eruption's loudest blasts were heard nearly 3,000 miles away. Simkin and Fiske have gathered eighty-eight eyewitness accounts, describing the events in the words of people who were there, and have selected twenty-eight scientific interpretations of the various phenomena written over the last one-hundred years. They have illustrated the book with more than 250 photographs, engravings, drawings, and maps, and have traced an extensive chronology of events. The result is a comprehensive volume on this benchmark event-history's most famous eruption. In addition to geologists, oceanographers will be interested in the devastating sea waves, meteorologists in the worldwide atmospheric effects, biologists in the return of life to barren island remnants, but any general reader will be fascinated by the eyewitness accounts of this spectacular eruption and its truly global effects.