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    Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts
    Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts
    Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts

    By Judy Dodge Cummings

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    About this ebook

    The energy released when volcanoes erupt, engines combust, or bombs explode both thrills and fascinates people. But this power also kills.

    Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts recounts the history of five blowups that continued to rattle the world long after the smoke had cleared and embers cooled. For example, in 1815, a mountain in Indonesia called Tambora erupted. This volcano unleashed a monstrous cloud of ash and gas into the upper atmosphere. For three years, the cloud played with the global environment, causing never-ending winters and famine that killed thousands.

    Some of the world’s most devastating explosions cannot be blamed on nature, but on human failings. In 1865, the steamship Sultana exploded while transporting thousands of federal soldiers just freed from Confederate prisoner of war camps. The greatest maritime disaster in United States history was caused as much by greed as a faulty boiler.

    A discussion about explosions wouldn’t be complete without mention of nuclear bombs. A desire to end the bloodshed of World War II led the United States to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The bomb hastened the end of war, but also killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and launched the nuclear age. This nuclear age brought a catastrophic explosion at a power plant in the former USSR in 1986. When a reactor blew at a facility in Chernobyl, radioactive fallout spread throughout Europe, creating a contamination zone unfit for human life for centuries.

    Powerful forces lie within the Earth and people who try to extract that power pay a high price. In 2010, a series of errors led the Macondo oil well to rupture. For three months, millions of barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, destroying plant and animal life and devastating the economy of the region.

    This is the eighth book in a series called Mystery & Mayhem, which features true tales that whet kids’ appetites for history by engaging them in genres with proven track records—mystery and adventure. History is made of near misses, unexplained disappearances, unsolved mysteries, and bizarre events that are almost too weird to be true—almost! The Mystery and Mayhem series delves into these tidbits of history to provide kids with a jumping-off point into a lifelong habit of appreciating history.

    The five true tales told within Eruptions and Explosions are paired with maps, photographs, and timelines that lend authenticity and narrative texture to the stories. A glossary and resources page provide the opportunity to practice using essential academic tools. These nonfiction narratives use clear, concise language with compelling plots that both avid and reluctant readers will be drawn to.

    Nomad Press books in the Mystery & Mayhem series introduce readers to historical concepts and events by engaging them in an extremely popular genre—real-life adventure and mystery. Readers ages 9 to 12 are fascinated with the strange-but-true tales that populate history, and books in this series offer compelling narrative nonfiction paired with concise language that appeals to both voracious and reluctant readers. Nomad’s unique approach to the study of history uses tantalizing tales based in factual knowledge that encourage a lifelong curiosity in the historical events that shape our world.

    Titles in the series include: Pirates and Shipwrecks; Survival; Weird Disappearances; Daring Heists; Rebels & Revolutions; Great Escapes; Tomb Raiders; Eruptions and Explosions; Epidemics and Pandemics; and Earth, Wind, Fire, and Rain.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNomad Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2018
    ISBN9781619306301
    Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts
    Author

    Judy Dodge Cummings

    Judy Dodge Cummings has written more than 20 books for children and teenagers. One of her books, Earth, Wind, Fire, and Rain: Real Tales of Temperamental Elements, highlights the true story of five of the United States’ deadliest natural disasters. One of the disasters featured in this book is the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.

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      Book preview

      Eruptions and Explosions - Judy Dodge Cummings

      Introduction

      Rumbles and Roars of Earth and Man

      The universe began with a bang billions of years ago as space expanded, doubling in size every fraction of a second. Since then, eruptions and explosions have never stopped rocking the planet. Some of these blowups are natural growing pains as Earth stretches her legs and cracks her knuckles.

      Others are man-made, the results of technology run amuck and humans hungry for power.

      The energy released when volcanoes erupt, engines combust, or bombs explode is thrilling and fascinating. It is also deadly. This book tells the stories of five violent outbursts that impacted the world long after the smoke cleared and the scattered embers cooled.

      In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted. The blast unleashed a monstrous cloud of ash and gas into the upper atmosphere. For three years, the cloud drifted from one continent to the other, toying with the climate. Blizzards here, floods there, an occasional drought. Harvests failed and people starved as famine struck country after country.

      Tambora gave the world a glimpse of the catastrophe climate change can bring.

      Many explosions are caused by mankind’s folly. On April 27, 1865, a steamboat full of American soldiers headed up the Mississippi River. The American Civil War had finally ended, and these men were survivors of Confederate prison camps. Skeleton-thin, sick, desperate to return to their loved ones, about 2,000 soldiers piled into the Sultana, a vessel built for only 300 people. In the middle of the night, an overworked boiler burst, shooting burning men into the dark waters of the Mississippi River.

      The greatest maritime disaster in American history, the Sultana explosion is a mostly forgotten tragedy.

      The bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, will never be forgotten. This first use of a nuclear weapon helped end the bloodbath of World War II, but also killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. It introduced the world to the horrors of radiation and launched a nuclear arms race.

      Nuclear energy not only fuels bombs, it also powers factories. On April 26, 1986, engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union were conducting an experiment that went horribly wrong. A reactor exploded and tons of nuclear fuel and contaminated debris shot into the air. Authorities kept silent about the explosion for days as deadly radiation spread across Europe.

      The area around Chernobyl will remain unfit for human life for tens of thousands of years.

      The earth holds power in its core, a prize to whoever can extract it, but that prize can come with a high price. On April 20, 2010, a British Petroleum oil well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, killing 11 people and gushing crude oil into the sea. For 87 days, experts struggled to plug the leaky well, which lay more than 5,000 feet below the water’s surface. Birds and fish died. Beaches along America’s Gulf Coast were closed. Fishermen went out of business and the nation struggled to find someone to blame.

      The explosions and eruptions of Earth and man bring tragedy, but also opportunity. Within every story of death and destruction hides a lesson. The planet rumbles and roars, Fix this. Stop doing that. Change your path or bad things will happen.

      Read these stories and heed their warning.

      Before it’s too late.

      Chapter One

      Monster Awakened

      In the 1818 novel Frankenstein, a scientist named Victor Frankenstein toils in his laboratory. He is trying to discover how to bring the dead back to life. Frankenstein stitches together scavenged body parts, injects secret chemicals into the corpse, and on a dark and stormy night, the creature awakens. But something has gone horribly wrong.

      Instead of a man, a monster rises from the table.

      Gigantic and deformed, the hideous being has yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the … muscles and arteries beneath. Horrified at what he has done, the scientist flees. The monster escapes the laboratory and tries to enter society, but everyone hates and fears him.

      The creature is hungry for revenge against the man who abandoned him. He wanders the earth on the hunt for the scientist.

      Artwork by Theodor von Holst from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

      This classic tale was written by Englishwoman Mary Godwin, better known by her married name, Mary Shelley, during the stormy summer of 1816. Frankenstein’s creation could have been inspired by a real-life monster—Mount Tambora. When it erupted in 1815, the volcano unleashed a powerful destructive force. Tambora’s ash cloud hovered in the upper atmosphere for three years.

      From there, it laid waste to the global climate.

      The cloud sent snow in summer and drought in winter. Violent thunderstorms rained down on Mary Shelley’s head. Did the horrors of the climate inspire her to write a horror story?

      Buried in Tambora’s terrors is a cautionary tale. Cataclysmic climate change has the power to kill millions of people and make life miserable for millions more.

      Follow Tambora’s road of ruin to understand this monster’s warning to the present.

      Mount Tambora is located in Sumbawa, an island on the eastern edge of the archipelago nation of Indonesia. In 1815, Tambora loomed 14,000 feet over the Java Sea, its peak jutting proudly into the sky. The small kingdom of Sanggar sat at Tambora’s feet, ruled by a local leader called the raja.

      April was the beginning of the dry season, a busy time on Sumbawa. The rice crop was almost ready for harvest, and village men worked hard chopping down sandalwood trees to supply shipbuilders.

      Two worries kept the raja awake at night. Pirates from a northern island had preyed on coastal villages, kidnapping people to sell as slaves. And recently, the long dormant volcano on Mount Tambora had begun to rumble.

      That rumble turned into a roar just before sunset on April 5, 1815. The raja thought a pirate vessel had somehow slipped to shore unseen and fired a cannon.

      Then, the raja saw a flame bursting from Tambora’s summit and realized the volcano had erupted. For three hours, the monster trapped inside the mountain bellowed. Then, it suddenly stopped.

      The raja ordered the villagers into the rice paddies to clear the ash and dust from the plants, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The monster was slumbering once more.

      But Tambora was only napping.

      At 7 p.m. on April 10, the mountain awoke with a monstrous explosion. Three columns of fire burst from its peak, uniting into a massive ball of flame. The mountain’s slopes glowed red as rivers of gas and rock fragments called pyroclastic flows raced to the sea at speeds of 100 miles an hour.

      The air above these rivers was a searing 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (538 degrees Celsius). As the hot air rose, cold air swept in underneath, creating a whirlwind of ash and dust. The whirlwind inhaled everything in its path and spit it back out again.

      An hour later, a 15-foot-high tsunami swept inland, washing away rice fields and huts. As hot pyroclastic flows

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