Mount Tambora: The Year Without a Summer

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result it was the year without summer in europe china india and north america 1816 was a year of endless winter snow fell in july rivers froze in august and crops failed on a gigantic scale maybe up to a million people died of famine or disease yet the awful year also laid the seeds of the century to come migration patterns literature art politics all were affected in ways so profound we're still living with the results today in all of human history there have only ever been a handful of vei7 eruptions the volcanic equivalent of the richter scale the volcanic explosivity index or vei measures blasts by how many cubic kilometers of debris are unleashed a vi7 eruption means a minimum of 100 cubic kilometers of fiery nightmare fuel hurled skyward the second largest level of blast known to man roughly ten times bigger than krakatoa in 1883 they almost always have horrific consequences the terror eruption in 1600 bc for example is thought to have led to the downfall of the minoan civilization another in asia may have wiped out japan's earliest cultures but even when placed alongside these monsters mount tempora is still something else thought to be possibly the largest blast since the 2nd century a.d tambora is also the only vei 7 event to take place in the modern age and because history just loves to be terrifying it's doubtful that anyone saw it coming prior to mount tambora blowing its top no one even realized that it was a volcano towering 4000 meters over the island of zambawa in what is now indonesia tembora had spent centuries as nothing more than a landmark as unthreatening as any other geologically inactive lump of rock then in 1812 everything changed that year tembora suddenly started making noises today we know that this period was like a singer clearing their throat before the main performance a succession of little coughs before the mountain vomited up fire in 1812 though people were all just like well that's a thing and carried on living around tambora like nothing was happening it would be a decision with devastating consequences come 1815 the territory around tambora had fallen under temporary british control as the royal navy seized colonies around the world as part of the maolionic wars so when cannonfire was heard across on the nearby island of java governor stampered raffles scrambled ships to fight off what he assumed was an impending invasion but it quickly transpired that there was no cannon fire the sound everyone had mistaken for artillery well that was tambora's first eruption the blast that echoed out on april 5th 1815 was a big one by any standard herd up to a thousand kilometers away launched ash into the stratosphere for a good three hours before finally subsiding in the normal course of things this would have been a major event an eruption capable of making headlines but this wasn't the normal course of things to return to our analogy the eruption of april v was like our singer belting out a few test notes just to get their voice ready the real performance i was about to begin five days later on april the 10th the show finally started shortly before sunset tembora gave an almighty rumble before exploding with a force almost beyond comprehension the top 1200 meters of the mountain were blown clean off leaving a crater almost 6.5 kilometers across enormous clouds of debris blasted out so enormous that instead of hurtling into the sky they rolled down the mountainsides hundreds of kilometers an hour superheated clouds of death destroying everything in their path inside those hurricanes of ash gigantic boulders were hurled around so big they smashed apart buildings within seconds all settlements in a 20 kilometer radius of tembora had been annihilated up to 10 000 people died instantly their flesh burned from their bones at last this great volcano had awoken by the time it fell dormant again over 90 000 people would be dead and the entire planet would be hurtling towards catastrophe [Music] after it went up the tambora volcano didn't stop spewing out ejector until july 3 months later in that time it turned the entire surrounding area into a non-stop horror show heavy ash fell across the island for weeks suffocating people poisoning water supplies collapsing homes in this deadly environment nearly everything died crops failed on a massive scale causing widespread starvation but nearly everything isn't quite the same as everything in the dirty stagnant water left behind tiny microbes began to thrive spreading out to find new hosts sweeping across the land yeah this was the next horseman of tambora's apocalypse our familiar friend pestilence across spring and summer of 1815 dysentery gripped the island like wildfire tens of thousands of already weakened people succumbed to the disease as the situation grew desperate locals fled abandoning entire villages some even selling their children into slavery just to escape we know of this today is mostly thanks to one man over on java governor stan for raffles the future founder of singapore by the way got wind of the disaster and sent some people to investigate their reports form one of the biggest sources of information we have about the eruption by the time zambora finally stopped belching fire as much as half of zambarwa's 180 000 strong population was dead or missing making this the deadliest known eruption in history the after-effects would also change the face of the island forever when the local sultan had zambawa resettled he brought in vast quantities of slaves transforming the local demographic makeup but it wouldn't just be this one region that tambora's effects would make themselves felt roughly six years earlier in 1809 another big volcano had blown its top somewhere in the tropics although minuscule compared to tambora it had ejected a colossal amount of sulfur into the atmosphere traces of which we still find today in ice core samples this is important because once sulfur reaches the high atmosphere it stays there drawing a faint veil around our planet that might not disperse for six or more years this veil intercepts some of our sun's light cooling the earth's surface and changing the climate ever since the 1809 eruption the northern hemisphere had been experiencing one of the coldest decades on record now with tambora ejecting several extra cubic heck tons of sulfur their veil got even thicker however it wouldn't affect the entire planet equally when tropical volcanoes like tambora go up the way our atmosphere works means the crap they hurl out gets dispersed into both hemispheres but the effects are felt most in the north while tempora is thought to have cooled the planet as a whole by half a degree celsius eurasia and parts of north africa may have cooled by four whole degrees right now climate change activists are freaking out about a three degree increase in global temperatures so you can imagine just how damaging a four celsius degree drop might be by the end of 1815 news of the tembora eruption had at last reached london over the following weeks cross-atlantic ships would carry the tail onwards to america sadly no one at the time was capable of figuring out what this meant the science that would allow us to connect tambora with weather disruption wouldn't develop until the mid-20th century the people in 1815 reading about tembora was just a case of going well sucks for indonesia and then moving on with their lives had modern science existed though they might not have been so blase because even now that shroud of sulphur was coiling its way around the planet wrapping it in a smothering embrace in just a few short months it would cause disaster now we're really going to blow up the world in just a second but first it's time to give a shout out to today's fantastic video sponsor curiosity stream curiosity stream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best 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curiositystream.com forward geographics for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series and as a special deal for you guys you can get a free 30-day trial to try out curiosity stream just use code geographics at checkout and now let's get back to the video [Music] at the precise moment tembora erupted half a world away europe was right in the middle of losing its collective april 10 1815 laddered slapbang in the middle of a period known as the hundred days when napoleon escaped his island prison of elba and plunged europe back into chaos by the time napoleon was finally defeated at waterloo that june the continent had been in a state of constant warfare for nearly 25 years the economy was a mess political tensions were reaching breaking point post-war demobilization was about to cause a surge of unemployment into this already unstable situation tembora was about to casually drop a holy hand grenade the year that would become known as the year without summer dawned as it always does in britain cold and miserable and wet but while british weather usually transitions to slightly less golden wet as the months go by spring 1816 didn't seem to see any improvements even by the standards of the region it rained endlessly in ireland there were eight straight weeks of rain that killed off nearly all the crops in england the growing season was almost non-existent but the wet spring was just beginning summer would be even worse as june dawned that year hard frost hit central europe devastating the food supply down in italy orange brown snow was reported to fall at the height of summer in london spectacular sunsets were reported that turned the sky brilliant greens and reds by august rivers were frozen solid on certain days the sun barely seemed to rise at all the results were immediate and catastrophic in britain widespread crop failure caused the price of bread to double although few actually starved it was only thanks to well-established maritime trade networks 1816 saw britain import more foodstuffs than in any other year in history in the major papers editorials spoke of the vanished summer as god's wrath and church attendance spiked those things would improve in 1817 another set of failed harvests that year saw rural riots across the british isles some historians have even suggested that you can connect the effects of tambora with the increased political radicalism of the time radicalism that peaked in 1819 with the peterloo massacre certainly the failed harvest seems to have acted as an accelerant yet britain was relatively lucky other countries would fare far worse back in ireland the widespread failure of the potato crop led to a miserable famine compounded by a typhus epidemic by some measurements over 800 thousand people were infected while as many as a hundred thousand died in central europe too things took a bleak turn as in ireland famine and disease gripped the region in the german states it was almost impossible to bring in food in fact things got so bad that the famine of 1816 has been called europe's last great subsistence crisis uncountable numbers died parts of italy two were hit by famine but they were also hit by something else apocalyptic panic the bologna prophecy had been made by an anonymous astronomer who predicted that sunspots would overwhelm our star and cause darkness by july the 18th 1816. so when a dark cold spring was followed by an even colder darker summer plenty began to freak out that the end of the world was nigh but it would be in italy's neighbor switzerland that arguably the most famous side effect of tambora took place there the abysmal weather wouldn't just kill crops and flood towns it would also give birth to a monster in the end it was the endless rain that did it back when they'd left london for switzerland mary godwin her stepsister claire claremont and mary's lover percy had all been desperate for a summer spent boating in the sun on lake geneva the weather that spring was awful in britain but it wasn't only the rain that they were looking to escape ever since mary had hooked up with percy shelley in her mid-teens when he was already a famous poet society had been scandalized mary's father had tried his damnedest to stop them from getting married meanwhile a separate scandal had engulfed claire when she fell pregnant with the baby of another famous poet the dashing and dangerous lord byron now the two stepsisters were fleeing the stairs and the gossip and heading south towards what they hoped would be freedom instead they wound up swapping one cage for another all through the journey south the weather was freakishly bad in france the party's carriage almost got trapped in snow in the alps by the time they reached geneva the town was flooded with the lake gloomy with endless rain at first the group tried to make the best of a bad situation writing about the sublime beauty of the thunderstorms that flashed above the mountains gathering in lord byron's rented villa diodati to discuss the big stories of the day one of the biggest was the science of galvanism inspired by the lightning outside percy shelley byron and byron's personal doctor john polidori discussed the then exciting idea of applying electric currents to corpses to stimulate movement as the men argued mary godwin sat nearby listening intently it was an intellectually stimulating evening but as the rainstorms caused by tambora refused to abate such evenings became increasingly rare before long the party's members became utterly sick of one another trapped in byron's village days on end everyone slowly slipped from acting like intelligent poets to acting like total dicks dr polidori kept trying to seduce mary even after she told him no claire meanwhile was doing her best to woo byron who suddenly wanted nothing to do with his pregnant lover just as it was starting to look like everyone was either going to kill or have sex with each other to break the tension or possibly both byron suggested a game one that would change literary history he challenged everyone present to pass the time by writing a ghost story although they all took up the challenge the only one to make any headway first was john polidori his fragment about a seductive undead aristocrat would later be expanded into the novel the vampire today widely recognized as the first modern depiction of well you guessed it a vampire but it would be mary godwin who wound up creating the most influential monster of all unable to hit on a plot for her story during those long rainy days mary found herself lying awake one night while the mother of all tambora storms boomed outside just as she was starting to get frustrated there was a flash of lightning in that flicker the 18 year old later claimed she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life the vision would become the germ for her groundbreaking 1818 novel subtitled the modern prometheus or as you better know it frankenstein pleasing as it is to discover that the boris karloff's monster really was born on a dark and stormy night the bad weather caused by tembora wasn't just responsible for mary shelley and polidori's horror stories that same summer lord byron would also write darkness an apocalyptic poem about a day on earth when the sun suddenly stops rising 750 kilometers north in london the artist jmw turner meanwhile watched the strange hazy sunsets that affected the capital that year before long he'd have incorporated this strange type of light into one of his paintings creating one of the greatest bodies of art the world has ever known not that tembora's side effects end with culture before that miserable summer was out it would have transformed the politics of china and america and laid the grounds for the deaths of tens of millions of people while mary shelley bolidori and byram were all blowing off steam by writing like mad over on the east coast of america the weather was getting as strange as in europe in june new england was inundated with 50 centimeters of snow up north in montreal things got so cold that animals froze to death in the middle of the street that year's independence day was celebrated in virginia not with outdoor parties but with sleigh rides and people huddled around their fireplaces for warmth philadelphia was frozen with ice in mid-summer at his home in monticello thomas jefferson watched in horror as an entire year's worth of crops were destroyed by the cold but while jefferson could suck up the loss and apply for a loan regular folk weren't so lucky by fall the east coast poor were forced to eat wild animals like hedgehogs just to survive when that appalling summer was followed by a horrific winter thousands reached the end of their tether the end of 1816 and hall of 1817 saw people abandoning homesteads across new england and heading west in search of somewhere just less damn cold although they dispersed all over a huge number of presbyterians wound up moving towards the great lakes and the burned-over district since many presbyterians were also abolitionists this had the weird side effect of turning the midwest into the heart of the anti-slavery movement in america the migration also had the much more direct effect of helping illinois get admitted to the union just a couple of years later yet the political upheavals caused by tambora didn't end in the fledgling united states over in china the changing weather patterns were going to shape the entire 19th century the years 1816 to 1818 were unbelievably cold ones in the yunnan province so called that the entire rice harvest perished not just once or twice but three summers in a row with the creeking qing dynasty unable to keep its affected subjects fed through the crisis panic broke out untold numbers starved families killed their weakest members babies and seniors alike just in order to survive by the time the weather returned to normal in 1819 the people of yemen were through with subsistence farming they wanted cash money they could hoard for future hard times almost as one the peasants of yanan stopped planting rice and began planting opium thanks entirely to a volcano erupting 4000 kilometers away yunnan would soon grow into the opium heartland of the world and considering the massive role opium played in imperial china's many misfortunes over the next 50 years that has to count as a major effect still it wouldn't be in china that tambora changed the lives of the most people that would be in india and spoiler alert change in this case is a really polite way of saying end around the bay of bengal the weather in 1816 and 1817 was severe drought followed by monsoon seasons of unimaginable intensity unknown to anyone at the time these extreme conditions would turn out to be the perfect breeding ground for a new super-infectious strain of cholera once that cholera made it into the human population it would lead to the deaths of tens of millions the first mass casualties of the cholera outbreak were india's colonial overlords the british army in the bay of bengal lacking any natural immunity were nearly wiped out by this new strain of the disease from there the cholera swept out of the bay heading both east and west causing untold devastation to every community it passed through finally in 1831 it reared its ugly head in london then the largest city in the world one year later it arrived in new york over the following decades the mass cholera outbreaks caused by the tambora strain would claim millions of lives however they would also slowly lead to a sanitary revolution one which over the course of several decades would turn places like london from a gigantic open sewer into a modern city with modern drainage and waste collection it's thanks to the sanitary revolution that you're not watching this today from a house built atop a leaking cesspit just meters from a river overflowing with human poo it's also thanks to this revolution that millions and millions in the developed world don't get infected every year with cholera and typhoid and other nasty diseases sadly the revolution came too late for the untold scores who died in the outbreaks today it's thought that the one-two punch of the tambora eruption in the following year without summer qualifies as one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history tambora itself killed over 90 000 when it erupted while the average death toll for 1816's crop failures and abysmal weather is usually estimated at around a million if you add all the cholera deaths in on top of that well then tembora could probably give something like world war one a run for its money while it's easy to focus on the disaster aspects of tambora's eruption the truth is that it changed our world in ways that go way beyond merely being good or bad there's the westward migration in america that the weather disruption caused leading to the modern history of the great lakes region there's the huge advances in germ theory and sanitation only made possible by the awful cholera outbreaks there's also the profound impact on literature and pop culture that tambora had all because mary shelley found herself trapped inside by its climactic effects forced to right out of sheer boredom the reality is that this is probably only still scratching the surface it's only recently that we discovered the tools for understanding how this one event in april 1815 affected modern history and there's doubtless more to be uncovered as recently as 2018 for example a paper published in the prestigious journal geology argued that a rainstorm caused by tambora may have been responsible for napoleon losing at waterloo while that may be a stretch bad tactical decisions on napoleon's part also played a huge role it goes to illustrate just how crazy an event tembora was how just one eruption that powerful can be enough to reshape the globe and who's to say that it won't happen again when tambora exploded in 1815 it didn't stop being a volcano to this very day it remains active capable perhaps of erupting with such force all over again if that does happen then who knows how it might affect us in the long run what unpredictable side effects it might cause in fields we know almost nothing about because if there's one thing researching tabora has taught us it's that you can never predict the future for better and for worse these freak events will always happen and no one can possibly say how we humans will deal with the fallout so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and check out our fantastic sponsor curiosity stream there's a link below and thank you for [Music] watching you

Channel: Geographics

Views: 572,504

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Id: 9nJDTR6R7Gc

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021