ENVIRONMENT

The Year Without a Summer

1815 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In April 1815, Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, produced the largest eruption in recorded history. The following year, Europe and North America lived through a summer of frosts and failed harvests, the last great subsistence crisis of the Western world; snow and killing cold reached even the rice lands of southern China. The world cooled by about a degree, and the famine year left odd traces, from Frankenstein, begun in that sunless Geneva summer, to waves of emigration.

Why it matters

Tambora is the modern reference for what one volcano can do to a connected world: a single Indonesian mountain raised the price of bread in Paris and of rice in Yunnan. For climate science it is the natural experiment against which models are tested, aerosols, monsoon failure, carbon-cycle response. And it is recent: a little over two hundred years lie between us and the summer that never came.

Dating & uncertainty

Tambora erupted in April 1815; the famous cold summer was 1816. Climate modelling puts the global cooling near one degree, with precipitation down and the carbon cycle visibly perturbed; proxies from China show frost and snow reaching the subtropics. The background was already cold, with a solar minimum and an unidentified eruption in 1809 behind it: Tambora struck a climate that was already ailing.

Sources

1. Luterbacher & Pfister (2015), Nature Geoscience · The year without a summerdoi:10.1038/ngeo2404
2. Gao et al. (2017), Journal of Meteorological Research · Climatic aftermath of the 1815 Tambora eruption in Chinadoi:10.1007/s13351-017-6091-9
3. Kandlbauer et al. (2013), Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · Climate and carbon cycle response to the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruptiondoi:10.1002/2013jd019767

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:0257.9 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day