Very early in the morning I touched down on Jogya’s
Adiscipto Airport, flying low over a muddy grey river and
velvety soft green creases in the earth, both phenomena caused
by the city’s nemesis, Mount Merapi, which towered over
the whole region to the north.
Geophysically, Indonesia is extraordinarily complex, the only
region on earth where so many different tectonic plates -
divergent, convergent, and sliding – interact. All along
this 4200-kilometer stretch of islands, great undersea masses
of land have smashed together, creating what is essentially
a second Himalayan range.
Take for example the archipelago’s K-shaped islands
of Sulawesi and Halmahera straddling two main plate convergent
areas, visual evidence of earth-shatttering slow-motion collisions.
That these great collisions took place in the middle of the
ocean accounts for Indonesia’s thousands of islands
- uplifted peaks of the earth’s crust.
Mount Merapi (“Mountain of Fire”), a nearly 3000-meter-high
volcano 25 km north of Jogya, is the largest volcano in central
Java. Its steep ravines, carved out of aeons of lava flows,
are also the most accessible of the region’s volcanoes
for the purposes of understanding Indonesia’s geology.
One of the world’s most destructive volcanoes, Merapi
is more or less in a constant state of eruption. A catastrophic
blast in 1006 AD nearly buried Borobudur, the great Buddhist
stupa 48 km distant, covering three out of five of the monument’s
terraces. That calamity so devastated central Java that the
region remained uninhabitable for generations.
Merapi now erupts about once every 5.5 years and has killed
nearly 1,600 people in 26 eruptions since 1930. In November
1994, in the small village of Turgo on the mountain’s
slope, a searing 220 C degree cloud (awan panas) burned alive
92 people and seriously wounded dozens more, most of whom
were guests at a wedding party. Resulting from a rupture in
the lava dome, this nasty rolling ball of gas, steam, ash,
sand and volcanic debris devoured everything in its path as
it moved down the mountain at speeds of up to 90 km an hour.
More than 1.3 million cubic yards of lava poured down the
mountainside in a few short hours during a 1994 episode.
There are presently five volcanology posts high on its slopes
as well as NOAS satellite images helping to keep an eye on
the beast, plus a crew of up to 1,000 men on call. More than
40 check dams and dikes protect the populace, and large areas
beneath the volcano are categorised as “forbidden zones.”
I wandered amidst the ruins of houses destroyed by the sand
and ash that covered the area after the emission. A middle-aged
man, his arms and head heavily scarred, led us to a bunker
that had been built inside one of the newer houses. With walls
30 cm thick, it was large enough to hold 20 people if a hot
cloud ever descends upon the village again.
Fresh eruptions began in April of 2006, with smoke from the
volcano reaching a height of 400 m, and in late May an unassociated
earthquake 38 km to the southwest killed at least 5,000 and
left 200,000 homeless.
But Mount Merapi and the 18 other active volcanoes of Java
don’t only destroy and wreak havoc but also bring enormous
benefits. All of Java relies upon the gorges of Merapi for
building materials. Another great boon is the region’s
unmatched fertility, the reason why villagers, time and again,
move right back up to as high as 1700 m on the mountain to
start cultivating their fields within just weeks after a major
eruption.
Key to Indonesia’s 129 Volcanoes
A fellow rock hound and I drove around the foothills of Mount
Merapi. This tour of the so-called Djogdja Basin is, in essence,
a study of the effects of the volcano’s frequent eruptions.
Along the way I saw an occasional horse cart, web-footed farmers
in wide round hats with sapit (sickles), women who staggered
under burdens of firewood.
Below the road, gentle pagoda-like Javanese-style mosques
and villages of tiled roofs were stained by countless monsoons.
Under darkening clouds, fields of singkong (cassava), groundnuts,
forests of kayuputih (eucalyptus) and teak, new lakes, and
bright green native rice fields.
We drove around base of Merapi on the hunt for geologic sedimentation,
onto the lips of outcrops and monstrous gorges scratched out
by millennia of eruptions. The higher we climbed, the more
devoid of human life. The few people we ran across were work-hardened,
their skin turned leathery from toiling under the sun all
their lives. With their dark complexions and high cheekbones,
they looked a different race than the lowlanders.
Our last stop of the day was Babadan, at 1278 meters the highest
volcanologist’s post on the northwest side of the mountain.
Perpetually wreathed in mist and cloud, Babadan is also the
nearest – a scary 4.4 km from the crater. A sign warns
visitors to park their vehicles in a position on the road
that would facilitate a hasty escape.
This was a fitting end to the day’s geo tour. Now I
understood what geologists say - that if you study Merapi,
you’ll understand 70% of all of Indonesia’s volcanoes.
Indeed, Merapi shares the same volcanic arc as other the archipelago’s
fiery behemoths such as Mount Semeru in East Java, Mount Agung
of Bali, and Mount Rinjani of Lombok.
Through the all-revealing, pervasive lens of a geologist,
the island is stripped of sentimentality, human subjectivity
- even of time itself. Geologic measurements make a mockery
of Java’s venerable past as this is a science that reaches
back one hundred million years to the island’s very
birth.
Like all its fiery brethren, if you visit Babadan at night
while Merapi is erupting you’ll see huge red globs of
molten rock glowing, crackling, hissing and popping in the
darkness. This is as close as you’ll get to the gates
of hell.
