Editorial Dire global warming fixin Merapi’s fiery bowels

Saturday, November 13, 2010 • Martin Gibson

It would be handy if newspapers could size stories according to their impact on the person reading them, a bit like the world map that shows countries proportionately to their populations.

Stories popping up here and there about the erupting Merapi volcano, on the island of Java, would be much larger.

Gunung Merapi is the most active of Indonesia’s 129 volcanoes. It smokes at least 300 days a year, and makes the top five of most “World’s most dangerous volcanoes” lists.

Merapi is loosely translated as Mountain of Fire.

It sits on the edge of the same Indo-Australian plate as New Zealand — the “ring of fire” that links New Zealand to the rest of the Pacific Rim.

More than 200 people have now died in the current eruption, and 400,000 people have been displaced. But that is a small taste of what would happen if it really got going.

German volcanologists have estimated the magma reservoir beneath Merapi is enormous, with three times more magma than was ejected by the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815 — which was the biggest eruption in the last 10,000 years, and led to a cooling of the climate globally.

Things become less newsworthy when they carry on for a few weeks without anything changing, and officials have been quoted as saying the worst may be over, but volcanoes are tough to predict.

Merapi’s biggest and most devastating eruptions occurred in 1006 and 1930. The eruption of 1006 was so bad that many believe the Hindu kingdom in the area was destroyed, as it spread ash over all of central Java.

All New Zealanders would be affected by an eruption of this magnitude.

Just as things are less worthy of big stories when they have been happening for a while, we ignore things that do not happen all that often.

In human years it has been a long time since there was a Krakatoa-sized eruption that cooled the Earth. But in geological terms, it is the blink of an eye.