scream - a geography lesson

is this how you'll look tomorrow when you see your Geog paper? or your results in two weeks' time? :)



this is a famous piece of work drawn in 1893 by artist Edvard Munch. this is what he has to say about what inspired him to draw this (rather pessimistic piece):

I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

what's interesting is the 'geography' behind it. why was the sunset sky blood red (ie.redder than usual)?

A: The reddish sky in the background was possibly inspired by the aftermath of the powerful volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The ash that was ejected from the volcano left the sky tinted red in much of eastern United States and most of Europe and Asia for quite a while, from November, 1883 to February, 1884.

More facts: Eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in August 1883 generated twenty times the volume of tephra (ash) released by the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Krakatoa was the second largest eruption in history, dwarfed only by the eruption of neighboring Tambora in 1815.

More scattering by the ash particles resulted in only the red frequencies reaching our eyes thus the red sky (this is the same concept as why the sky is red during sunset as the light has to travel a longer distance through the atmosphere thus more scattering occurs).

A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away by the time it reaches our eyes.

oookay. didn't manage to share this interesting nugget in atmos tutorial this year due to time constraints so i'm doing it here after one of you asked about Krakatoa :) but no, we are not setting a 9m question on "Why is the sky blue?". if we do, you could be creative and write along the lines of "Because pink would really be overdoing it".

take a break but not for long, as there's still PW and MT (for some of you). see you all in sch.

love,
miss h