Judy Dodge Cummings - Eruptions and Explosions: Real Tales of Violent Outbursts

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ISBN Softcover: 978-1-61930-631-8
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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 mankinds 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 waters surface. Birds and fish died. Beaches along Americas 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 its too late.

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. Frankensteins creation could have been inspired by a real-life monsterMount Tambora. When it erupted in 1815, the volcano unleashed a powerful destructive force. Tamboras 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 Shelleys head. Did the horrors of the climate inspire her to write a horror story?

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