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Indonesia
Tourism
SEISMIC ACTIVITY
Indonesia is located at the focal point of the Pacific plate, the Eurasian plate and the Australian plate. The result is a very strong volcanic activity and frequent earthquakes. Poorly fixated, the outer arc is the scene of many earthquakes. The city of Ambon, formal capital of spice trade, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1764. The last major earthquake occurred off the coasts of Sumba (1977) and Flores (1992). The inner arc of the country is the largest volcanic zone of the world: 128 active volcanoes, of which 80have emerged over the past twenty-five years. Since 1918, a violent eruption occurs on average every three years. Among the major disasters, the eruption of Krakatoa (1883), located in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, made 36,000 fatalities after the tsunami it caused, while in Bali, the Gunung Agung (1963) plunged the city of Surabaya (Java) in complete darkness for twenty-four hours. The current eruptions are usually explosive, with pyroclastic and incandescent lava flows. Lahars, devastating mudslides, are cold when rain accompanies the eruption, and hot when the crater lake drains off rapidly. Sumatra has a hundred volcanoes, which makes the largest system in the world; the Toba is a gigantic collapsed dome (100 km long, 300 km broad), cut in half by a ditch partially occupied the lake of the same name. Java has 125 volcanoes, of which 25 are active. The most impressive volcanic forms are the calderas; natural amphitheaters that can exceed 10 km in diameter. Those volcanoes often lay on a clay and marl base, rocks on which they were able to slip, like the Merapi in the 10th century. Its sliding may have caused the ruin of the first Hindu and Buddhist kingdom of Mataram located in Java.
