“THE hardest bit of the job is having enough sleep,” admits Martanto, a 29-year-old geophysicist at the monitoring centre for Agung, a volcano in Bali which started erupting on November 25th. For the past two weeks he and half a dozen others have relocated from Bandung, in West Java, to keep watch on Agung every hour of the day, occasionally in continuous 32-hour shifts. Their base is rudimentary: a room plastered with maps, graphs and lists of telephone numbers. In one corner sits a seismometer, a cylindrical machine which measures earthquakes; in another corner a radio is on standby, in case of an emergency. Outside, a huge plume of ash spews from the crater at Agung’s peak. The smell of sulphur hangs thickly in the air.
Indonesia is the most volcano-pocked country in the world, with 127 active ones. It was home to both the biggest eruption of modern times, that of Tambora in 1815, and the second-biggest, of Krakatoa in 1883. Agung’s previous eruption, in 1963, was the most...Continue reading
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