28. Loud and Lethal
By the time Krakatoa’s chaos ended, whole islands had vanished in what is now Indonesia, and tens of thousands had perished. According to the Dutch colonial authorities’ estimates, the catastrophic eruptions and resultant tsunamis killed at least 36,000. However, modern estimates put the disaster’s true casualty figures at up to 120,000.
Ships sailing in Krakatoa’s vicinity after the disaster reported seeing giant rafts of floating pumice, some of them several miles wide. Indian Ocean currents carried some of those rafts up to 5000 miles, to the shores of Zanzibar in East Africa. There, horrified locals discovered that, fused to the pumice, were the bones of numerous human skeletons, monkeys, big cats, and myriad other creatures.