KRAKATAU

David Key's Investigations

British researcher David Keys believes that an enormous eruption of an Indonesian volcano in 535 A.D. caused catastrophic changes to Earth's climate.2 He concluded that the guilty volcano was Krakatau -- spelled Krakatoa by Keys, but erroneously so. (See footnote on p. 162 of Volcanoes in Human History3)

On page 253 of his book, Keys refers to one of the historical sources for his conclusions about Krakatau. [My explanatory comments are in brackets]:

Bearing in mind that the eruption [that produced the catastrophe] had to have occurred in the southern tropics, the area pinpointed by the Chinese account [of a blast heard thousands of miles away to the southwest of China] narrows the field to the southern Sumatra/western Java part of the Samoa-Sumatra volcanic chain.

Significantly, there is only one known caldera of appropriate size and vintage in that relatively small (six-hundred-mile-long) area. It surrounds the site of no less notorious a volcano than Krakatoa, the island mountain that brought death and destruction to Java and Sumatra in the 1880s. Could an earlier, bigger eruption of Krakatoa have been responsible for the catastrophe that tormented the world in the mid-sixth century A.D. and changed its history forever?