Weather Eye with John Maunder

The peculiar 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 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 the site a 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. It's estimated it caused the death of more than 100,000 people.

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 three degrees Celsius 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.

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.

For further information, see: www.volcanodiscovery.com/tambora.html or see http://history1800s.about.com/od/crimesanddisasters/a/The-Year-Without-A-Summer.htm