On August 27, 1883, the island of Krakatau in the Sunda Strait near Java erupted with a force nearly ten thousand times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Two-thirds of the island disappeared. When the pall of ash lifted, the toll in human lives stood at nearly 37,000 and more than 160 villages had been wiped away without a trace. All plant and animal life on Krakatau was obliterated.

Nine months after the explosion, a French expedition searching for signs of life discovered a single spider that had crossed to the island on a balloon of silk. Life had returned to Krakatau. Scientists have been studying the island ever since.

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After the eruption, Krakatau provided a unique opportunity to study the colonization of a sterile area by plants and animals across a sea barrier and the gradual incorporation of the newcomers into the developing ecosystem. Krakatau: The Destruction and Reassembly of an Island Ecosystem is a comprehensive account of the reassembly of a tropical forest ecosystem over the past century. Ian Thornton tackles the many questions and controversies surrounding the eruption and its aftermath.

He writes, "The natural healing process has followed the most extreme form of ecological destruction possible, total biological extirpation. Yet the islands surviving the 1883 eruption are covered in secondary forest, and over 200 species of plants, 70 species of vertebrates, and thousands of invertebrate species now inhabit these forests."