On July 9, 1816, residents of Connecticut awoke to a hard frost, as temperatures had dipped to the high 20’s overnight.
On July 9, 1816, residents of Connecticut awoke to a hard frost, as temperatures had dipped to the high 20’s overnight. It was a weather pattern repeated throughout the summer of 1816. The source of this anomalous weather was the massive eruption of a 13,000-foot mountain named Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Scientists now believe that it was the loudest noise heard in recorded history.
The immediate effect of the Tambora blast was to kill more than 12,000 people in the nearby environment; the long term effect was to create a cloud of ash and dust so immense in the stratosphere that it would block out enough sunlight to cause temperatures to plunge significantly and to cause “the year without summer.” It was a climate extreme that hadn’t occurred since 536 A.D.
In that summer of 1816, brown, yellow, and red snow was seen to fall in parts of Italy and of Hungary. Europeans suspected a volcanic explosion to be the cause, and they were right. Rated a 7 out of 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index, the noise of the explosion was heard over 1,000 miles away! (Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was a 4.) What was described in contemporary newspapers then as a “dry fog” seemed to be lingering every morning over everything; in fact, the “fog” was actually dust from the volcano.
The effects of this “fog” were dramatic. The growing season in New England —normally 160-180 days long — was reduced to less than 70 days. One contemporary diarist stated, “July came in with ice and snow. On the 4th, ice as thick as window glass formed throughout New England, New York, and Pennsylvania.”
Savannah, Georgia’s temperature got no higher than 46 degrees on the 4th of July. Thinking that perhaps the climate had changed permanently, the years of 1816-1817 saw a mass emigration from all of the New England states to the Midwest, which hadn’t turned so cold.
Since 1816 was a pre-railroad time period, ice formed on the canal system that was used to import food into the Northeast. Food shortages were widespread, as most crops died in New England. As many as 200,000 people worldwide starved to death. There was no corn to feed the animals, so many died or had to be slaughtered for food.
Newspaper articles of the time reveal that many New Englanders blamed Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod for their anomalous weather. They thought that somehow the lightning rod robbed heat from the atmosphere. Others attributed the condition to witchcraft; still others thought that somehow the human race had displeased God. Franklin, however, though long dead, had predicted in 1783 that ash from volcanoes might some day adversely affect the earth’s climate. He was right.
The effects on the cultural world were dramatic as well. Driven inside by unusually cold weather in Geneva, Switzerland, Mary and Percy Shelley and their friends had a contest to see who could write the scariest story. The result? Mary Shelley won with her now-famous story of “Frankenstein.”
Meanwhile, in England, the talented painter J.M.W. Turner, inspired by the brilliant sunsets induced by an abundance of dust in the atmosphere, was moved to paint many of his famous landscape scenes.
Turner’s fellow Englishman– the poet, Lord Byron– was moved in 1816 to write his poem entitled “The Darkness,” in which these lines can be found:
“Morn came and went/and came/ and brought no new day”– a concise and apt summary for the “year with no summer.”
