The Year Without A Summer

Eighteen Hundred and Starve to Death

Map of unusually cold temperatures in Europe during the summer of 1816. Temperature anomalies are in degrees Celsius (°C) with respect to 1971-2000 climate normals. Creative Commons, authored by Giorgiogp2

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth.
– Darkness by Lord Byron, 1816

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On June 7th, heavy snow fell in New England, with 18 to 20-inch drifts in Philadelphia. Frozen birds dropped dead in the streets of Montreal, where a foot of snow had accumulated. Frost, ice, and snow were common in June, killing almost all green plants, and on July 4th, people were still wearing heavy overcoats during the day.[i] On the same day in the south, Savannah, Georgia, recorded a high temperature of 46°F (7.8°C.)[ii] Throughout New England on the morning of July 6th, there was ice as thick as window-glass, encrusting lakes and rivers as far south as Pennsylvania, causing crops to wither.[iii] Food was so scarce that people resorted to eating raccoons and pigeons, and a few people subsisted on porcupine and boiled nettles.[iv]

During the entire month of August, there were no sunny, warm days. Severe frosts produced ice that was half an inch thick in many places, freezing the growing corn. As a result, very little corn ripened in New England and scarcely any in the middle of the country.[v] In September, the small amount of corn that had survived was entirely frozen, causing the ears of corn to rot. The stench from the decaying corn was so offensive that people avoided passing downwind of a cornfield. During the New England growing season, the frosts had killed almost all of the main crops.[vi]

Things weren’t any better in Europe as the cold and wet summer led to famine and food riots, as crop yields across the British Isles and Western Europe plummeted by 75%.[vii] This resulted in one of the worst typhus epidemics in history. In England, refugee families traveled long distances looking for food, and in Ireland, there was widespread famine following crop failures.[viii] In Switzerland, the food crisis was so bad that people resorted to eating moss as well as cat,[ix] horse, and dog meat.[x] Swiss women who couldn’t feed their children committed infanticide rather than see them starve to death. Those mothers were later prosecuted and decapitated for their actions.[xi]

This abnormally cold summer and resultant tragic events happened over 200 years ago in the year 1816. It was known as the “Year Without a Summer” or as farmers referred to it as “Eighteen Hundred and Starve to Death.” That year inspired Lord Byron to write his apocalyptic poem Darkness and Mary Shelley to pen her most famous novel, Frankenstein.[xii]

Violent Volcanoes - The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 was the biggest in recorded human history. The diagram shows the cubic miles of material ejected.

The previous year in Indonesia, an event occurred that directly impacted what was happening on the other side of the globe, from North America to Europe. In April 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano in the northern part of the island of Sumbawa, erupted violently. The eruption was 100 times more energetic than the 1980 blast from Mount St. Helens, situated in Washington state, and 10 times more than the famous 1883 eruption of Krakatau, located in Indonesia.[xiii] It ejected 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of gas, rock, and ash into the air, with enough ash and pumice to cover 260 square kilometers to a depth of over 3.5 meters (100 square miles, 12 feet deep).[xiv] It is the most massive eruption on record, roughly 20 times bigger than Mount Vesuvius in Italy, that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.[xv] This eruption destroyed the city of Tambora and caused tsunamis over 4.5 meters (14 feet) high. These catastrophes and the resulting destruction of livestock and crops led to an estimated 71,000 to 121,000 deaths.[xvi]

The eruption destroyed the top three thousand feet of the volcano, blasting it into the air in pieces, leaving behind only a large crater three miles wide and half a mile deep, as though the mountain had been struck by a meteor.[xvii]

The Tambora volcanic eruption spewed ash containing sulfur dioxide (SO₂) about 44 kilometers (27 miles) high into the stratosphere.[xviii] It left many places within a 600 kilometer (370 miles) radius pitch black for one or two days,[xix] while Tambora’s ash cloud expanded to cover a region nearly the size of the continental United States.[xx]

The material spread across the stratosphere of the globe, forming a planetary-wide molecular sunscreen, dimming the sun, and dropping surface temperatures, as well as wreaking havoc on weather patterns. Over the subsequent three years, the particles in the stratosphere increased the amount of solar radiation reflected back into space. This decreased the amount of energy reaching the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface.[xxi] The overall effect was that global temperatures were lowered by about 1.7°C (3°F).[xxii] Although this temperature change may seem small, it was enough to bring about the widespread crop failures that resulted in famine and disease outbreaks in 1816.[xxiii]

The principal cause of this global cooling was aerosols injected high into the atmosphere by Tambora’s eruption. Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere that scatter a portion of the incoming light from the sun back into space.[xxiv] In the case of volcanic eruptions, the primary aerosol is SO₂.[xxv] In the atmosphere, the SO₂ combines with water vapor to form sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄), which then quickly condenses into tiny sulfate (SO₄) aerosols.[xxvi] Because these tiny particles are two hundred times finer than the width of human hair, they easily remain suspended in the upper atmosphere as an aerosol cloud.[xxvii]

Winds in the stratosphere spread these aerosols until they cover most of the globe. While volcanic ash will fall out of the lower atmosphere within a short period, these sulfate aerosols remained in the stratosphere for approximately two or three years while also affecting the climate.[xxviii] In the case of Mount Tambora, it’s estimated that it expelled into the atmosphere 60 Tg (teragrams) or 60,000,000 metric tons (66,000,000 tons) of SO_2,[xxix] equal to the weight of 180 Empire State Buildings or 40 million cars.[xxx]

The June 1991 eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines left no doubt that sulfur dioxide [SO₂] from volcanoes is the primary way they affect climate. Pinatubo was the 20th century’s second-largest eruption, behind only the 1912 eruption of Novarupta on the Alaska Peninsula in 1912... In the United States, the summer of 1992, was the third coldest and third wettest in 77 years.[xxxi]

A temperature increase of half to one degree might seem insignificant. Still, as with the 1.7°C (3°F) temperature drop with the Tambora eruption, it can significantly impact the climate. We like to believe our modern selves are mostly separate from the environment in which we actually exist. In 1815, Tambora, a single volcano, erupted and formed a crater 6 kilometers (4 miles) in diameter.[xxxii] This area is only about 0.0000005% of the Earth’s surface, and the 60 Tg of SO₂ thrown into the 5.1 billion Tg total Earth’s atmosphere[xxxiii] is about 0.00000117% of that atmosphere. This seemingly small amount relative to the Earth’s size chilled the global climate and had devastating impacts on human agriculture, food supply, and societies.

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Parts of this article are from my new book, Moving Back From Midnight, which is available on Amazon.

https://movingbackfrommidnight.com/

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[i] Doyle Rice, “200 years ago, we endured a ‘year without a summer’,” USA Today, May 26, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2016/05/26/year-without-a-summer-1816-mount-tambora/84855694

[ii] Keith Veronese, “The Year Without a Summer, and How It Spawned Frankenstein,” Gizmod, February 17, 2012, https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-year-without-a-summer-and-how-it-spawned-frankenst-5885668

[iii] Felix J. Koch, “A Year Without A Summer,” The Farm Journal, October 1909, vol. XXXIII, no. 10, p. 432.

[iv] Gillen D'Arcy Wood, “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster,” Nautilus, October 5, 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-volcano-that-shrouded-the-earth-and-gave-birth-to-a-monster-rp

[v] The Historical Record A Monthly Publication Devoted Principally to the Early History of Wyoming Valley, March 1887, vol. 1, no. 7, p. 107.

[vi] Clive Oppenheimer, “Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815,” Progress in Physical Geography, 2003, pp. 230-259, DOI: 10.1191/0309133303pp379ra

[vii] Gillen D'Arcy Wood, “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster,” Nautilus, October 5, 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-volcano-that-shrouded-the-earth-and-gave-birth-to-a-monster-rp

[viii] Clive Oppenheimer, “Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815,” Progress in Physical Geography, 2003, pp. 230-259, DOI: 10.1191/0309133303pp379ra

[ix] Emma Johnston, “Up From The Ashes,” Popular Archaeology, May 31, 2012.

[x] Gillen D'Arcy Wood, “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster,” Nautilus, October 5, 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-volcano-that-shrouded-the-earth-and-gave-birth-to-a-monster-rp

[xi] Jane J. Lee, “Volcanic Eruption That Changed World Marks 200th Anniversary,” National Geographic, April 10, 2015, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150410-tambora-volcano-eruption-climate-change-famine-earth-science

[xii] Keith Veronese, “The Year Without a Summer, and How It Spawned Frankenstein,” Gizmod, February 17, 2012, https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-year-without-a-summer-and-how-it-spawned-frankenst-5885668

[xiii] Emma Johnston, “Up From The Ashes,” Popular Archaeology, May 31, 2012.

[xiv] Doyle Rice, “200 years ago, we endured a ‘year without a summer’,” USA Today, May 26, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2016/05/26/year-without-a-summer-1816-mount-tambora/84855694/

[xv] Jane J. Lee, “Volcanic Eruption That Changed World Marks 200th Anniversary,” National Geographic, April 10, 2015, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150410-tambora-volcano-eruption-climate-change-famine-earth-science

[xvi] Jack Williams, “The epic volcano eruption that led to the ‘Year Without a Summer’,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/04/24/the-epic-volcano-eruption-that-led-to-the-year-without-a-summer

[xvii] William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, “Tambora Erupts in 1815 and Changes World History [Excerpt],” Scientific American, March 1, 2013.

[xviii] Achmad Djumarma Wirakusumah and Heryadi Rachmat, “Impact of the 1815 Tambora Eruption to global climate change,” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2017, doi:10.1088/1755-1315/71/1/012007

[xix] Clive Oppenheimer, “Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815,” Progress in Physical Geography, 2003, pp. 230-259, DOI: 10.1191/0309133303pp379ra

[xx] Gillen D'Arcy Wood, “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster,” Nautilus, October 5, 2017, http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-volcano-that-shrouded-the-earth-and-gave-birth-to-a-monster-rp

[xxi] Christoph C. Raible, et al., “Tambora 1815 as a test case for high impact volcanic eruptions: Earth system effects,” WIREs Climate Change, July/August 2016, vol. 7, pp. 569-589, doi: 10.1002/wcc.407

[xxii] Jane J. Lee, “Volcanic Eruption That Changed World Marks 200th Anniversary,” National Geographic, April 10, 2015, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150410-tambora-volcano-eruption-climate-change-famine-earth-science

[xxiii] Jack Williams, “The epic volcano eruption that led to the ‘Year Without a Summer’,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/04/24/the-epic-volcano-eruption-that-led-to-the-year-without-a-summer

[xxiv] “Atmospheric Aerosols: What Are They, and Why Are They So Important?” NASA, August 7, 2017, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Aerosols.html (accessed September 20, 2008).

[xxv] “Atmospheric Aerosols: What Are They, and Why Are They So Important?” NASA, August 7, 2017, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Aerosols.html (accessed September 20, 2008).

[xxvi] “Volcano World: Measuring Volcanic Gases,” Oregon State University, http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/measuring-volcanic-gases

[xxvii] William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, “Tambora Erupts in 1815 and Changes World History [Excerpt],” Scientific American, March 1, 2013.

[xxviii] Jack Williams, “The epic volcano eruption that led to the ‘Year Without a Summer’,” The Washington Post, June 10 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/04/24/the-epic-volcano-eruption-that-led-to-the-year-without-a-summer

[xxix] Christoph C. Raible, et al., “Tambora 1815 as a test case for high impact volcanic eruptions: Earth system effects,” WIREs Climate Change, July/August 2016, vol. 7, pp. 569-589, doi: 10.1002/wcc.407

[xxx] Empire State Building Fact Sheet, http://www.esbnyc.com/sites/default/files/esb_fact_sheet_4_9_14_4.pdf

[xxxi] Jack Williams, “The epic volcano eruption that led to the ‘Year Without a Summer’,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/04/24/the-epic-volcano-eruption-that-led-to-the-year-without-a-summer

[xxxii] “Sumbawa Tambora, Indonesia,” Oregon State University, http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeast_asia/indonesia/tambora.html

[xxxiii] Kevin E. Trenberth and Lesley Smith, “The Mass of the Atmosphere: A Constraint on Global Analyses,” National Center for Atmospheric Research, June 29 2004, pp. 864-875.