Tsunami caused by Anak Krakatoa’s collapse

In­done­sia’s emer­gency teams con­tin­ued to search for sur­vivors yes­ter­day in the rub­ble left by the tsunami that hit the Sunda Strait on Sat­ur­day be­tween the is­lands of Java and Suma­tra. So far 371 deaths have been recorded, 128 peo­ple are miss­ing, 1,459 are in­jured and 12,000 have been evac­u­ated. Yes­ter­day ge­ol­o­gists con­firmed that the erup­tion of the Anak Kraka­toa vol­cano lo­cated in the mid­dle of the strait led to an un­der­wa­ter land­slide that caused the tsunami.

Local of­fi­cials and sci­en­tists stated yes­ter­day that the tsunami was caused by a par­tial col­lapse of Anak Kraka­toa. Anak Kraka­toa is 300 me­ters high and has a crater to one side, it had been erupt­ing daily over the last three months, spray­ing ash and lava, until a whole sec­tion of the south­west­ern face of the moun­tain, about 64 hectares fell to the sea. “This caused an un­der­wa­ter land­slide and even­tu­ally caused the tsunami,” ex­plained Dwiko­rita Kar­nawati, head of the In­done­sian me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal agency. This has also been con­firmed in im­ages of the deadly nat­ural phe­nom­e­non cap­tured by the Eu­ro­pean Space Agency’s Sen­tinel-1 satel­lite. The 64 hectares of land fell to the sea and trig­gered the giant waves that dev­as­tated the near­est coastal zone. Ap­par­ently warn­ings were not trig­gered be­cause the tsunami was caused by a vol­cano rather than by an earth­quake.