Krakatoa

Where is Krakatoa?

Krakatoa is part of the Krakatoa island group, Sunda Strait.

You will find it in: Indonesia.

Summit: 6.102° S, 105.423° E

The story behind it

Krakatoa lies in the Sunda Strait, the stretch of sea between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. On 26 and 27 August 1883 the volcano tore itself apart in a series of explosions, most of the old island vanished, and the blast set off a tsunami. The sound carried 3 600 kilometres to Alice Springs in Australia and 4 780 kilometres to the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, which makes it probably the loudest noise ever recorded. What remains is a ring of islands around the sunken crater; the tallest of them, Rakata, still rises 813 metres straight out of the sea. In 1927 a new cone began to grow in the middle of that ring, and from August 1930 it stayed above the waves for good: Anak Krakatau, the "Child of Krakatoa". It grew by roughly seven to nine metres a year until December 2018, when a large part of it slid into the sea and the summit dropped sharply. Sources give very different heights for it today, from 110 and 157 metres right after that collapse to 285 metres in a more recent listing, because the mountain keeps rebuilding itself.

Find it on the globe

Krakatoa is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.