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Weather Eye with |
The 19th Century weather disaster - dubbed “The Year Without a Summer” - happened in 1816, when weather in Europe and North America took a bizarre turn which resulted in widespread crop failures and famine.
On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia produced the largest
eruption then known on the planet during the last 10,000 years. The volcano
erupted more than 50 cubic kilometres of magma. The eruption produced
global climatic effects and killed more than 100,000 people, directly and
indirectly. Pyroclastic flows reached the sea on all sides of the peninsula,
and heavy tephra fall devastated croplands, causing an estimated 60,000
fatalities. Entire villages were buried under thick pumice deposits.
Some of the settlements have recently been brought back to light by
archaeological excavations, making a site called ‘Pompeii of Indonesia’.
While the death toll of people living on Sumbawa and surrounding
coastal areas was high enough, even more fatalities can be attributed to
an indirect effect of global climate deterioration after the eruption.
These changes turned 1816 into ‘The Year without a Summer’ for
much of Europe, causing widespread famine. The reason for the climatic
changes was increased absorption of sunlight due to a veil of aerosols
dispersed around both hemispheres by stratospheric currents from the
tall eruption column. Global temperatures dropped by as much as 3°C
in 1816.
Unprecedented weather in 1816
‘The Year without a Summer’ was well reported in the United States and
Europe, as the following description suggests.
The weather in 1816 was unprecedented. Spring arrived but then
everything seemed to turn backward, as cold temperatures returned. The
sky seemed permanently overcast. The lack of sunlight became so severe
farmers lost their crops and food shortages were reported in Ireland,
France, England, and the United States. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson
retired from the presidency and farming at Monticello sustained crop
failures that sent him further into debt.
But It would be more than a century before anyone understood the
reason for the peculiar weather disaster: the eruption of an enormous
volcano on a remote island in the Indian Ocean one year earlier had
thrown enormous amounts of volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere.
But before the cause was known, in Switzerland, the damp and dismal
summer of 1816 led to the creation of a significant literary work. A group
of writers, including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his future
wife, challenged each other to write dark tales inspired by the gloomy
and chilly weather. During the miserable weather Mary Shelley wrote her
classic novel Frankenstein.
The Albany Advertiser went on to propose some theories about why
the weather was so bizarre.
The mention of sunspots is interesting, as sunspots had been already been seen
by astronomers. What’s fascinating is the newspaper article from 1816
proposes such events be studied, so people can learn what is going on.
For example:
“Many seem disposed to charge the peculiarities of the season, the
present year, upon the spots on the sun. If the dryness of the season has in
any measure depended on the latter cause, it has not operated uniformly
in different places – the spots have been visible in Europe, as well as in
the United States and yet in some parts of Europe, as we have already
remarked, they have been drenched with rain.”
“Without undertaking to discuss, much less to decide, such a learned
subject as this, we should be glad if proper pains were taken to ascertain,
by regular journals of the weather from year to year, the state of the
seasons in this country and Europe, as well as the general state of health
in both quarters of the globe. We think the facts might be collected, and
the comparison made, without much difficulty; and when once made,
that it would be of great advantage to medical men, and medical science.”
Volcanic hazards
Today, in 2023, we now know volcanoes can pose many hazards. One
hazard is that volcanic ash can be a threat to jet aircraft where ash particles
can be melted by the high operating temperature. The melted particles
then adhere to the turbine blades and alter their shape, disrupting the
operation of the turbine.
Large volcanic eruptions can affect temperature, as ash and droplets of
sulphuric acid obscure the sun and cool the Earth’s lower atmosphere, or
troposphere. However, they also absorb heat radiated up from the Earth,
thereby warming the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere. Historically, so-
called "volcanic winters" have caused catastrophic famines.
And from Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. ‘1816, The Year without a Summer’.
Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino
Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net,
we read the following:
“To be alive in the years 1816-18, almost anywhere in the world,
meant to be hungry. Across the globe during the so-called ‘Year without
a Summer’ – which was, in fact, a three-year climate crisis – harvests
perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains.
Villagers in Vermont survived on hedgehogs and boiled nettles, while
the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists
travelling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on
the march.”
“Famine-friendly diseases cholera and typhus stalked the globe
from India to Italy, while the price of bread and rice, the world’s staple
foods, skyrocketed with no relief in sight. Across a European continent
devastated by the Napoleonic wars, tens of thousands of unemployed
veterans found themselves unable to feed their families.
They gave vent to their desperation in town square riots and military-style campaigns
of arson, while governments everywhere feared revolution. In New
England, 1816 was nicknamed ‘Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death’
while Germans called 1817 ‘The Year of the Beggar’. ”
“In the scientific literature, the 1816’s cold summer was the most
significant meteorological event of the nineteenth century. The global
climate emergency period of 1816-18, as a whole, offers us a clear window
onto a world convulsed by weather anomalies, with human communities
everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in weather
patterns, and to a consequent tsunami of famine, disease,
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For further information on a range of weather and climate matters see my recent book "Climate Change: A Realistic Perspective.. The fall of the weather dice and the butterfly effect" . Available from Amazon.au
