The Krakatoa volcano is in Indonesia. And forget the movie—Krakatoa is actually west of Java. But the events depicted in the film, Krakatoa, East of Java, actually did occur on this date in 1883.

Krakatoa is an island unto itself made up of, you guessed it, cooled lava. The Krakatoa volcano rises to 813 meters in elevation (2,667 feet). In 1620, the Dutch set up a naval station on the island and later tried to establish pepper plantations. But the soil was lousy and the Dutch decided to use the place as a penal colony starting in 1809.

By 1883, Krakatoa was devoid of permanent residents. The closest inhabitants were the 3,000 or so people on the island of Sebesi about 12 km away.

There were a series of documented eruptions of Krakatoa—in 416 AD, 535 and 680. But none of them compared to what happened on August 26, 1883. The disaster actually was presaged by a series of smaller eruptions in June. The shaking and plumes of ash intensified on August 26. A day later, a series of four explosions (which could be heard in Perth, Australia about 2,500 km to the south) almost destroyed the island altogether. Ash shot 50 miles into the sky.

The combination of lava flows, ashes and tsunamis killed thousands. The Dutch listed the death toll as 36,417 but some say it reached as high as 120,000. In the year following the eruption, average global temperatures fell by as much as 1.2° C and didn’t return to normal until 1888.

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