1-2-3 ka-boom!! Many happy returns (within reason, please) to Anak Krakatoa, sole surviving child of Krakatoa the Great.
Anak was born 123 years ago yesterday, at 6am local time, when its mother went completely off her head while in labour.

You know the story, but somehow they keep digging up more stuff from the hardened lava river beds. A recent BBC “factual drama” called “Krakatoa – The Last Days” upturned some previously unknown scary bits about the world’s biggest explosion and first global media event: a man riding a crocodile to safety, for example; Krakatoa had erupted even more powerfully 200 years earlier, for another.
Anak can be tempestuous too: it’s been erupting since 1927, the last recorded explosion coming in 2001.
(Let’s hope the Beeb gets its little ducklings of truth in a row better than the 1969 movie “Krakatoa, East of Java”, starring Maximilian Schell and Diane Baker (and Sal Mineo!), which for starters would have been more correctly titled “Krakatoa, West of Java”.)

As The Independent reported when the documentary aired in May: “The sky was bathed in an unearthly red glow and the fallout was felt around the world. The force of the eruption created the loudest noise ever recorded: it was heard 4,653 kilometres to the west on Rodriguez Island in the Indian Ocean and 4,800km away in Alice Springs, Australia, to the east.
“Shock waves travelled around the world seven times; and the force of the blast was some 10,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The volcano left 36,000 people dead and the survivors battled to cope with tsunamis, further eruptions and superheated ash clouds.
“As the volcano erupted, a plume of ash swept 80km into the sky, the hot gas became unstable and raced across nearby islands at 150km. ‘Those who weren’t killed by the intense heat,’ says Dr Dave Rothery of the Open University, ‘would have been sandblasted to death. It was hot enough to carbonise everything in its path.’
“The real killers, though, were the giant tsunamis that were unleashed, reaching heights of 40 metres and which were so violent that they flung sections of coral reef ashore, some weighing as much as 600 tons.
“The disaster produced a wealth of first-hand survivor accounts: a German quarry manager recounted being hurled by a wall of water from the top of his office block and swept into the jungle below. To his astonishment, he saw a crocodile being carried alongside him and incredibly he leapt on the animal’s back and rode it for 3km before being deposited, unharmed, on the rainforest floor.
“The rest of the world heard such stories almost instantly because a series of underwater telegraph cables had been recently laid traversing the globe. Krakatoa has been erupting irregularly since 250 AD; the last previous explosion was even more powerful and had happened only 200 years before the one in 1883, yet few had heard of this catastrophe.”