I watched a program on History Ch last night that said Tambora was the 'bang' of all bangs.
???
An early day British colonist heard the booms going off and assumed there was a naval battle going on. One day later he was being pelted with ash........he was 400 miles from ground zero.
They chronicled the effect on the atmosphere / climate / crops......unbelievable.
They compared the usual 'big boom' yardsticks (# of Hiroshima size atomic bombs blast equivlient, # of cubic meter / kilometers of now missing dirt/rock, # of feet the stuff was sent into the atmosphere, etc) between Mt St Helens, Krakatoa and Tambora.
Mt St Helens, of course, was nothing more than a mere firecracker.
Tambora threw (forget # of cubic kilometers, wish I would have recorded it) the top 1/3 of the mountain 30 - MILES - into the atmosphere.
According to the program, it is active - and no one is monitoring the beast.
LVM
They carefully differentiate between the Tambora explosion in the 1800s and earlier explosions by use of the word "history".