A Volcanic Eruption That Reverberates 200 Years Later
The deep volcanic crater, top, was produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 - the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history. Credit Iwan Setiyawan/KOMPAS, via Associated Press
In
April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook
the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators
are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they
now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global
pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters.
Around the lush isles of the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — the eruption of Mount Tambora
killed tens of thousands of people. They were burned alive or killed by
flying rocks, or they died later of starvation because the heavy ash
smothered crops.
More
surprising, investigators have found that the giant cloud of minuscule
particles spread around the globe, blocked sunlight and produced three
years of planetary cooling. In June 1816, a blizzard pummeled upstate
New York. That July and August, killer frosts in New England ravaged
farms. Hailstones pounded London all summer.
In
April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook
the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators
are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they
now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global
pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters.
Around the lush isles of the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — the eruption of Mount Tambora
killed tens of thousands of people. They were burned alive or killed by
flying rocks, or they died later of starvation because the heavy ash
smothered crops.
More
surprising, investigators have found that the giant cloud of minuscule
particles spread around the globe, blocked sunlight and produced three
years of planetary cooling. In June 1816, a blizzard pummeled upstate
New York. That July and August, killer frosts in New England ravaged
farms. Hailstones pounded London all summer.
A
recent history of the disaster, “Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the
World,” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, shows planetary effects so extreme that
many nations and communities sustained waves of famine, disease, civil
unrest and economic decline. Crops failed globally.
The Mount Tambora eruption's
profound aftermath influenced the skies of 19th-century paintings like
“Chichester Canal,” above, by J.M.W. Turner.
Credit
Tate, London 2015
“The
year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only
to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of
gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human
vampire, which have loomed large in art and literature ever since.
“The paper trail,” said Dr. Wood, a University of Illinois professor of English, “goes back again and again to Tambora.”
The
gargantuan blast — 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens’s — and its
ensuing worldwide pall have been the subject of increasing study over
the years as scientists have sought to comprehend not only the planet’s
climatological past but the future likelihood of such global disasters.
Clive
Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, who has
studied the Tambora catastrophe, put the chance of a similar explosion
in the next half-century as relatively low — perhaps 10 percent. But the
consequences, he added, could run extraordinarily high.
“The modern world,” Dr. Oppenheimer said, “is far from immune to the potentially catastrophic impacts.”
Before
it exploded, Tambora was the tallest peak in a land of cloudy summits.
It lay atop the tropic isle of Sumbawa, its spires rising nearly three
miles. Long dormant, the mountain was considered a home to gods.
Villages dotted its slopes, and nearby farmers grew rice, coffee and
pepper.
On
the evening of April 5, 1815, according to contemporary accounts,
flames shot from its summit and the earth rumbled for hours. The volcano
then fell silent.
Five
days later, the peak exploded in a deafening roar of fire, rock and
boiling ash that was heard hundreds of miles away. Flaming rivers of
molten rock ran down the slopes, destroying tropic forests and villages.
Days later, still raging but by then hollow, the mountain collapsed,
its height suddenly diminished by a mile.
Locally, an estimated 100,000 people died. Sumbawa never recovered.
The
repercussions were global, but no one realized that the widespread
death and mayhem arose from an eruption halfway around the world. What
emerged was regional folklore. New Englanders called 1816 “eighteen
hundred and froze to death.” Germans called 1817 the year of the beggar.
These and many other local episodes remained unknown or unconnected.
Dr.
Wood expanded the portrait in his book, which is due out in paperback
next month. It draws on hundreds of scientific papers as well as Dr.
Wood’s knowledge of 19th-century literature to lay bare three years of
planetary mayhem as well as the origins of fictional demons.
“My
interest was to understand a global event,” Dr. Wood said in an
interview, “and that meant serious detective work in lots of unfamiliar
archives.” Five years of inquiry took him to China, Europe and India.
It
also transported him to Tambora, where he braved leeches and
razor-sharp leaves to peer across its yawning caldera, four miles from
rim to rim.
The
exploding mountain, the book notes, heaved some 12 cubic miles of
earthen matter to a height of more than 25 miles. While coarse particles
soon rained out, finer ones traveled the high winds in a spreading
cloud. “It passed,” Dr. Wood wrote, “across both south and north poles,
leaving a telltale sulfate imprint on the ice for paleoclimatologists to
discover more than a century and a half later.”
The
global veil, high above rain clouds, reflected much sunlight back into
space. So the planet cooled. The pall, Dr. Wood said, also spawned
tempests far below.
His book reprints an 1816 oil painting of Weymouth Bay,
a sheltered cove on England’s south coast, by John Constable — the sky
above churning with dark clouds. “Everywhere,” Dr. Wood said, “the
volcanic winds blew hard.” He noted that both history and computer
models speak of fierce storms back then.
The particles high in the atmosphere also produced spectacular sunsets, as detailed in the famous paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the English landscape pioneer. His vivid red skies, Dr. Wood remarked, “seem like an advertisement for the future of art.”
The
story also comes alive in local dramas, none more important for
literary history than the birth of Frankenstein’s monster and the human
vampire. That happened on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where some of the
most famous names of English poetry had gone on a summer holiday.
By
1816, Switzerland, landlocked and famously rugged, was beginning to
reel from the bad weather and failed crops. Starving mobs stormed
bakeries after bread prices soared. The book recounts a priest’s
distress: “It is terrifying to see these walking skeletons devour the
most repulsive foods with such avidity.”
That
June, the cold and stormy weather sent the English tourists inside a
lakeside villa to warm themselves by a fire and exchange ghost stories. Mary Shelley, then 18, was part of a literary coterie that included Percy Shelley, her future husband, as well as Lord Byron. Wine flowed, as did laudanum, a form of opium. Candles flickered.
In this moody atmosphere, Mary Shelley
came up with her lurid tale of Frankenstein, which she published two
years later. And Lord Byron hit on the outline of the modern vampire
tale, published later by a compatriot as “The Vampyre.” The freakish weather also inspired Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness.”
Dr.
Wood’s book documents many other repercussions of the planetary chill,
devoting a chapter to a cholera pandemic of 1817 that began in India and
globally killed tens of millions of people. Dr. Wood attributes its
rise to a deadly combination of monsoonal changes and pounding rains — a
main theory of leading cholera detectives.
The
pandemic spread and eventually reached the Dutch East Indies. On Java
alone it killed an estimated 125,000 people — more, Dr. Wood noted,
“than died in the volcanic eruption itself.”
He
also profiles the wintry chill in Yunnan Province in southern China, a
land of mountains and jungles roamed by tigers and elephants. Rice crops
there quickly failed, and famine gnawed deep for years. In July 1816,
Dr. Wood noted, the province had “unprecedented snows.”
The
poet, Li Yuyang, who was 32 as Tambora began its global rampage, wrote
of cold downpours and flash flooding in “A Sigh for Autumn Rain.”
Water spilling from the eaves deafens me.
People rush from falling houses in their thousands
And tens of thousands, for the work of the rain
Is worse than the work of thieves. Bricks crack. Walls fall.
In an instant, the house is gone.
People rush from falling houses in their thousands
And tens of thousands, for the work of the rain
Is worse than the work of thieves. Bricks crack. Walls fall.
In an instant, the house is gone.
Dr.
Wood closes with a portrait of the eastern United States in 1816,
focusing first on upstate New York. One day that June, four young
classmates walked to school, most barefoot. Then a blizzard struck.
Dismissed early, the children ran for their lives as the snow rose to
their knees. They succeeded in reaching warm cabins and fires.
For
Thomas Jefferson, the pain lasted longer. The retired third president
of the United States, at his estate in Virginia, faced a disastrous
summer in 1816 because of the remarkably short growing season. The next
year was just as bad.
In
a letter, Jefferson expressed concern about the possible ruin of his
Monticello farm “if the seasons should, against the course of nature
hitherto observed, continue constantly hostile to our agriculture.”
The
countless victims and occasional beneficiaries of Tambora’s fury were
oblivious to the volcanic roots of their circumstances, Dr. Wood noted,
making the challenge of writing about it formidable and “occasionally
mind-bending.”
More
generally, he said, the revelation of global volcanic ruin — a portrait
200 years in the making — offers a kind of meditation on the difficulty
of uncovering the subtle effects of climate change, whether its origins
lie in nature’s fury or the invisible byproducts of human civilization.
It is, Dr. Wood remarked, “hard to see and no less difficult to imagine.”
Correction: August 26, 2015
Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Tuesday with an article about the effects of the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815 misidentified the painter of a harbor scene depicting a vivid sky shadowed by ash clouds. He was Caspar David Friedrich, not David Caspar Friedrich.
Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Tuesday with an article about the effects of the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815 misidentified the painter of a harbor scene depicting a vivid sky shadowed by ash clouds. He was Caspar David Friedrich, not David Caspar Friedrich.
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