Into the Inferno Page #3

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in a bunker-like cell.

All the other prisoners perished,

but he survived,

albeit badly burnt, because there was

a tiny grill window in the cell,

and he subsequently joined

the Barnum & Bailey Circus

and was exhibited as a celebrity,

as the sole survivor of this eruption.

So, in 2010, the monitoring

was absolutely crucial

in forecasting the eruption

and its escalation.

The first indication was seismic.

A lot of volcanic earthquakes.

This indicates that there is magma moving.

Also, supported by these electronic

distance measurements.

And the gas measurements?

Of course.

I know this looks pathetic,

like a shoebox

with a baked bean tin stuck on the end,

and it also looks

like it's pointing at the ground,

rather than at the volcano summit

over here.

But it's something I'm very proud of.

It's something that we built in Cambridge.

There's a little window here,

and a mirror and some lenses,

connected to an ultraviolet spectrometer.

The device measures the emissions

of sulfur dioxide from the volcano

as the gases rise above the summit,

and this is a very important parameter

in many volcano-monitoring programs

around the world.

And the forerunner of this device

we had working here in 2010,

and it played an important role

in the hazard assessment,

and it's conservatively estimated

at something like 20,000 lives were saved

because of the effective monitoring

of Merapi in 2010

and the evacuation that followed.

I'm very happy to see

that it's still working. Uh...

I hold, along with some colleagues,

the patent for the original prototype,

which we designed

more than ten years ago now.

So, this technology is now found

on volcanoes around the world,

and it's revolutionized the monitoring

of gas emissions from volcanoes.

It's my baby.

I'm really glad to see it.

I haven't seen it for two years,

and here it is, still working.

Obviously, there was

a scientific side to our journey.

But what we were really chasing

was the magical side:

the demons, the new gods.

This was the itinerary

we had set for ourselves,

no matter how strange

things might eventually get.

Here in the palace

of the Sultan of Jogjakarta,

dignitaries are charged with the task

of reconciling the goddess of the ocean

with the demon of the volcano.

The sultan himself does not participate

in the procession.

We marveled at his parked Mercedes,

wrapped in a bubble of plastic,

as if the conceptual artist Christo

had just been here.

The procession stops for a ritual

close to the ocean.

This will be a reenactment

of the sexual union

between an ancient sultan

and the Queen of the Sea.

A doctoral student of Clive's,

Adam Bobbette,

functioned as our guide.

Every year, they have to

reproduce this by giving rituals...

by doing rituals in this site

and then giving offerings

to the South Sea from the sultan,

including his body parts...

fingernails, hair, clothes...

which they launch into the ocean

to appease the Queen of the South Sea.

As a part of their sexual union,

they also created a kind of monster

that ended up occupying the volcano.

So, this hole is where

they will give offerings,

because this is the site

of the sexual union

between the Goddess of the Sea

and the first sultan.

I think it's coming right now.

It's a box.

This is it.

And now the offerings to the ocean.

The following day,

we witnessed the ritual at the volcano.

Merapi, on this morning,

was not enshrouded in clouds.

After the ceremony, the crowd

went right for the flower petals,

an auspicious souvenir.

More strange magic.

Another bewildering alignment,

this time between a building

and the volcano,

here, barely visible,

as if floating in the clouds.

The odd edifice

is still under construction.

Inside, we found nobody

in an empty chair

pretending to watch TV.

On the floor above,

we met a few carpenters.

Yes, I am one of

the workers building this place.

What is it?

What are you building?

I built this.

The owner had a dream.

After that, he built this building.

A building to be used for prayer.

It looks like a chicken?

It's actually a dove, not a chicken.

But maybe it's also related to Merapi?

Maybe the owner thinks that way,

pointing it towards Mount Merapi.

I'm only an ordinary worker

who goes home after working hours.

But it still looks like a chicken, right?

Yes, most people say

it's like a chicken.

They call it the Chicken Church.

- A soap opera filmed a scene here.

- Yes.

It became popular

after the soap opera was shot.

Last Saturday,

someone from Surabaya

who saw the show,

wanted to see the location,

so they came here.

Odder still is the fact that,

in this mostly Muslim country,

this is a Roman Catholic church.

Under the floor,

it even has its own catacombs,

maybe as a shelter for hermits,

as protection against volcanic fallout.

Of all the many volcanoes

in Indonesia,

there is no single one

that is not connected

to a belief system.

For the locals,

all this volcanic landscape

bears magical names.

The Night Market of the Ghosts,

the Flying Foxes,

the Dancing Place of the Spirits.

Back to Lake Toba,

where Clive Oppenheimer's

scientific journey began.

This is the largest

volcanic crater lake on Earth.

It extends something like 100 kilometers

off into the distance.

Frankly, it's too big to film.

We should've booked a ticket

on the International Space Station

to look down from above

and appreciate its vast scale.

The eruption occurred

something like 74,000 years ago.

This was a monstrous,

stupendous volcanic eruption,

one of the very largest

that we've documented

in all of Earth history

for a single event.

The skies would've been darkened,

there would've been a conflagration

across this part of Northern Sumatra

as the pyroclastic currents spread out

radially around the crater,

igniting all of the tropical vegetation.

The eruption produced something like

15,000 cubic kilometers of ash and pumice

that was pumped

high into the stratosphere

and spread across the globe.

Enough pumice came out,

to bury everyone in the

United States to head-height.

It's something like 10,000 times larger

than the 1980 eruption

of Mount St. Helens.

It's 100,000 times greater

than the Eyjafjallajkull eruption

in Iceland in 2010

that disrupted global aviation.

This was the stupendous event

in Earth history.

And there's even a theory

that the eruption

almost wiped us out as a species.

Based on the genetic pedigree

of living humans,

we can say that there was a bottleneck

in human numbers around this time period.

And the link is between the climate change

wrought by the eruption,

the decimation of tropical vegetation

that was the resource base

for our ancestors.

Perhaps there were as few as 600

of our species left on Earth.

We would've been classified

as an endangered species.

Somehow, we rebounded.

This theory is very controversial,

however.

And that's because there's

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