THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES
300 million years ago, along the middle of the Eurasian subduction plates, intense seismicity and volcanism began to form the Indonesia archipelago.
Indonesia is now an immense archipelago of five major Islands, Sumatra in the west, Java, Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Papua in the east with more than 18,000 islands extending over 5000 km. It is situated at the boundaries of three major plates: Eurasia, India-Australia, and Pacific-Philippine Sea.
TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY
Seeing the World, Through the Eye of our Lens.
Volcanoes are central to these island’s existence and to the people that live under constant threat of seismic and tectonic activity. There are at least 95 volcanoes in Indonesia that have erupted since 1500. Thirty-two have records of very large eruptions with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of greater than four; nineteen have erupted in the last 200 years, including Tambora in 1815 and Krakatau in 1883. Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, is known for its impact on global climate, and its 1815 eruption resulted in the Northern Hemisphere’s 1816 “a year without summer,” epitomized by Lord Byron’s poem, ‘Darkness,’ when crops failed, causing famine and population movements across the globe. The eruption of Toba on Sumatra 74,000 years ago was even bigger (estimated VEI of 8) and is the largest eruption known on Earth in the last 2 million years.
Volcanic islands provide geology in its most raw form and the people irking out a living there offer a window into a world and culture at one with nature’s rhythms. We can’t control volcanoes so if you want to live on one, you have to get used to nature’s unpredictability.
It is no wonder then, that in the modern-day of adventure travel, climbing volcanoes captures our imagination and there is no greater awe-inspiring vista than the Tengger Caldera or descending into the Sulphur-spewing fumaroles of Ijen crater to witness it's magical blue fire on the Island of Java.
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