Eruptive illusion
Did you know that the most famous painting of Edvard Munch, Skrik (The Scream), that also inspired the character Ghostface from the Scream movies, has the reddish sky background based on real-life red sky that had been all over Europe and Asia and some parts of the United States in 1883? The uniquely colored sky that lasted for 3 months was the result of volcanic ash spreading from the powerful eruption of our Krakatau in 1883 that destroyed the mountain itself and rained death from above to the islands surrounding it and their inhabitants. The eruption also messed up global weather patterns for years until 1888, reducing global temperature by 1.2 °C. And it’s not the first time such catastrophe coming from Indonesia had the world in pieces. The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in Sumbawa was so massive that the aftermath resulted in what is known as the Year Without a Summer — climate abnormalities that destroyed crops and caused famine in parts of Europe. Not to forget that 74,000 years ago, Mt. Toba raged in a supervolcanic eruption, the largest in recorded history that caused six years of volcanic winter and created the now famous Lake Toba, and hypothesized to have caused the abnormal reduction of human population around the globe due to extreme climate change.
We live in an archipelago where the mountains can possibly one day removed the human population off the Earth with a single supermassive eruption. The natural bombs are never continents away, they’re all around us. Just because Merapi has calmed down doesn’t mean it’ll never rage again, your safety is merely an illusion. (Merapi has been deemed the most active volcano in the world anyway.)
So do what you love when the sky is still clear, for nobody knows when the mountains will once again instill fear.
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