In a few weeks the rice would be ready, and the raja of Sanggar, a small kingdom on the northeast coast of the island, would send his people into the fields to harvest. On Sumbawa Island, the beginning of the dry season in April 1815 meant a busy time for the local farmers. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems. The Tambora climate emergency of 1815–18 offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in temperatures and rainfall, and a flow-on tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation, and unrest. Mary Shelley’s storm-lashed novel Frankenstein bears the imprint of the Tambora summer of 1816, and her literary coterie-which included the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron-serve as tour guides through the suffering worldscape of 1815–18.Ĭonsidered on a geological timescale, Tambora stands almost insistently near to us. One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the cold, crop-killing days by the fire exchanging ghost stories. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march. Villagers in Vermont survived on porcupine and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the “Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” Across the globe, harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Meanwhile, from his studio on Greifswald Harbor in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted a sky with a chromic density that-one scientific study has found-corresponds to the “optical aerosol depth” of the colossal volcanic eruption that year.įor three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. William Turner drew vivid red skyscapes that, in their coloristic abstraction, seem like an advertisement for the future of art. Macmillan Publishers Ltd.Īrtists across Europe took note of the changed atmosphere. The volcanic eruptions could be heard twice as far away. Prevailing trade winds drove the ash clouds north and west as far as Celebes (Sulawesu) and Borneo, 1,300 kilometers away. The thickness of the ash is shown in centimeters. “Fair dry day,” he wrote in his weather diary-but “at sunset a fine red blush marked by diverging red and blue bars.” RAIN OF ASH: This map shows the density of ash fall issuing from Tambora’s eruption. Five months after the eruption, in September 1815, meteorological enthusiast Thomas Forster observed strange, spectacular sunsets over Tunbridge Wells near London. Within weeks, Tambora’s stratospheric ash cloud circled the planet at the equator, from where it embarked on a slow-moving sabotage of the global climate system at all latitudes. The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years. By shooting its contents into the stratosphere with biblical force, Tambora ensured its volcanic gases reached sufficient height to disable the seasonal rhythms of the global climate system, throwing human communities worldwide into chaos. It was the concentrated energy of this event that was to have the greatest human impact. Mount Tambora-located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies-blew itself up with apocalyptic force in April 1815.Īfter perhaps 1,000 years’ dormancy, the devastating evacuation and collapse required only a few days. Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place.
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