“THE hardest bit of the job is having enough sleep,” admits Martanto, a 29-year-old geophysicist at the monitoring centre for Agung, and 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 withhold watch on Agung every hour of the day, and 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, or in case of an emergency. Outside,a enormous 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 contemporary times, or that of Tambora in 1815,and the moment-biggest, of Krakatoa in 1883. Agung’s preceding eruption, or in 1963,was the most...
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Source: economist.com