Just before its last phase of activity many centuries before 1883, Krakatau was a mountain that’s stood 6,000 feet above sea level.
In May 1883, Krakatau northern volcano, Perbuatan, erupted after over 200 years of dormancy.
Volcanian eruptions, characterized by intermittent or continuous violent eruptions sending dark plumes of steam, gases and ashes several km high, and viscous magma extrusion, took place on August 26-27, l 1883.
When it erupted the entire top of the mountain and much of the portion below sea level disappeared and in their palace was a huge four mile-wide crater known as a caldera.
The Krakatau islands are roughly equidistant between Java (approximately 40 km away, and Sumatra (30 km).
Little is known about the islands prior to the events of 1883, although it is established that they were forest covered and had been largely dormant from 1680 until May 0f 1883.
The first sign of life on post-1883 Krakatau was a spider, recorded by an expedition in 1884.
The 1886 survey recorded a few beach plants, and in the interiors it recorded mosses, blue green algae, fern and a few higher plants.
Other life forms arrived quickly thereafter, and by 1897 Rakata supported young trees interspersed with tall, dense, grasslands and an abundance of ferns.
Today, Krakatau supports a wide variety of vertebrate and invertebrate fauna, including bats, birds, snakes, lizards, rats, crabs, scorpions, spiders, beetles, butterflies, ants and termites.
The interior forests of the Krakatau islands continue to accrue new species of higher plants, and the balance of species in the canopy is undoubtedly in a state of flux, with strong directional shifts in the importance of particular species being evident over the period since 1979.
Fig trees, which are particularly important part of the flora of tropical forest, provide another interesting problem in the colonization of Rakata. They are major component of the forests, the 17 fig species found in Rakata, Panjang and Sertung made up nearly two thirds of the total number of tree species there.
Krakatau Islands
