Most of us have heard of this bad boy and the toll of human lives it took either directly, with its April 1815 eruption, or indirectly through the climatic effects of the 60-some megatonnes of sulfur this eruption released, turning 1816 into the heavily populated Northern Hemisphere’s “Year Without A Summer.”
A week after its explosive climax, a passing ship’s captain described Tambora this way:
In passing it at the distance of about six miles, the summit was not visible, being enveloped in clouds of smoke and ashes, the sides smoking in several places, apparently from the lava which has flowed down it not being cooled; several streams have reached the sea; a very considerable one to the N.N.W. of the mountain, the course of which was plainly discernible, both from the black colour of the lava, contrasted with the ashes on each side of it, and the smoke which arose from every part of it. (Asiatic Journal, August 1816, 2: 165–67, quoted by Oppenheimer).
That is what Tambora looked like after raising a 26-mile-high plume and disgorging more than 50 km3 of magma, mostly as pyroclastic clouds of ash and larger lava fragments that sterilized the adjacent parts of Sumbawa and Lembok islands, killing over 71,000 residents either with the pyroclastic flows or a little later through famine and disease. (Oppenheimer)
What is Tambora like now, two hundred years later?
After all, here at the blog we have been looking into recovery from massive eruptions. While Tambora’s VEI 7 blast wasn’t exactly supersized, it was the biggest eruption in recorded human history.
Could life on and around the Senggar Peninsula that Tambora destroyed in mid-April 1815 ever come back from such an event?
This film crew who visited the caldera in 2016 saw a “lunar landscape” — but one with pure water running through it and plants greening up the piles of ash and debris:
This maker of the 2022 documentary “Majestic Tambora” found a very human presence here in Tambora National Park:
Yes, this site of mass devastation is now a national park!
They speak Indonesian, but the visuals are wonderful!
And since 2019, the park has hosted a UNESCO biosphere —
Will Tambora erupt again?
It has erupted again.
Three times since that 1815 catastrophe, the Global Volcanism Program reports, lava domes and flows have oozed out onto the caldera floor, most recently in 1967.
There was a seismicity uptick and some steam venting in 2011, too.
Indonesia raised the alert to 2 (out of 4) then, but Tambora now is back to baseline.
As for another cataclysm, I can’t find any information or study on its likelihood. It’s comforting to know that, in general, a volcano does not have such enormous eruptions back to back, if it repeats at all.
Also, Gertisser and Self mention a study that found that it took thousands of years for Tambora to accumulate the huge volume of magma that eventually erupted in 1815.
They also note, however, that very few studies of Tambora have been done since the 1980s.
This is only layperson speculation, but based on reading a variety of papers and books on other eruptions and volcanic systems, I think it most likely that Tambora will stay fairly quiet for a long time to come and that the volcano will give at least some warning as its activity escalates back up into the trouble zone.
What bothers me is that everyone thought Tambora extinct until 1810, when it first rumbled and spouted some ash.
The big question is probably better phrased like this: which of the “extinct” or dormant volcanoes in Indonesia or elsewhere will become the next “Tambora”?
Featured image: M. Rinander Tasya/Shutterstock
Sources:
Gertisser, R., and S. Self. 2015. The great 1815 eruption of Tambora and future risks from large‐scale volcanism. Geology Today 31, no. 4 (2015): 132-136.
Oppenheimer, Clive. 2003. Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1191/0309133303pp379ra.
Pyle, D. M. 2017. Tambora, 1815, in Volcanoes: Encounters Through the Ages. https://archive.org/details/volcanoesencount0000pyle/page/147/mode/1up?view=theater (Requires free Internet Archive account to borrow and read).
Flight To Wonder 