Krakatoa was a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra, beside one of the busiest shipping lanes of the Dutch East Indies. After months of activity, it tore itself apart on August 26 and 27, 1883. On the morning of the 27th a series of enormous explosions destroyed most of the island; the loudest was heard nearly three thousand miles away on the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean, where it was taken for the sound of distant guns. The explosions and the collapse of the volcano raised great waves that swept the low coasts of the strait, wiping out the town of Anjer on Java, much of Telok Betong on Sumatra and many villages besides. More than thirty-six thousand people died, nearly all of them in the waves. When the ash cleared, about two-thirds of the island had vanished, and the sea lay where its peaks had stood.Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society, G. J. Symons (editor), Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsAsh and gases thrown high into the atmosphere spread around the earth. Within weeks the sun appeared blue or green in parts of the tropics, and for months sunsets glowed blood-red as far away as London and New York. In the fall of 1883 the evening sky over the Hudson Valley was so vivid that firemen in Poughkeepsie turned out, believing a great fire was burning in the distance. Barometers around the world recorded the pressure wave from the explosion, and tide gauges registered the sea wave far from the strait. Because telegraph cables now linked Java to Europe and beyond, news of the disaster spread quickly, and scientists in many countries could compare their observations. The eruption became the first natural disaster studied by scientists around the world, and the library holds the reports in which they pieced together what had happened and why the skies had changed.