Year Without a Summer

• 1. Introduction

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  The Year Without a Summer is the name given to 1816, and a single date shows why. On the 6th of June, snow fell on Albany, New York, and on Dennysville, Maine. That is a startling sight in what should have been early summer. Similar oddities piled up across the Northern Hemisphere that year. Harvests failed, rivers overflowed, and in some places the sun itself looked wrong. The people living through it had no explanation, and the real cause lay far from the farms that suffered. What happened in the sky, who paid the price on the ground, and what did a miserable year leave behind?

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• 2. Tambora Erupts

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  In April 1815, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa erupted. The island belonged to the Dutch East Indies then and lies in modern Indonesia. Scientists rank the blast as a 7 on the volcanic explosivity index. It threw at least 37 cubic kilometres of dense-rock equivalent material into the atmosphere. No eruption in at least 1,300 years had been larger. That span reaches back to the hypothesized event behind the volcanic winter of 536. Tambora also remains the most recent confirmed eruption of that magnitude.

  Mayon in the Philippines erupted in 1814, and its effects may have made the climate impact worse. It belonged to a string of large eruptions in the preceding years, each rated at least 4 on the same scale. An unidentified eruption in the southwestern Pacific Ocean came in 1808. La Soufrière on Saint Vincent and Awu in the Sangihe Islands both erupted in 1812. Suwanosejima in the Ryukyu Islands followed in 1813. Together they loaded the stratosphere with dust, and that airborne material blocked sunlight.

  The numbers show the result. A 2012 analysis by Berkeley Earth found that Tambora alone cut average land temperature by about one degree Celsius for a time. The 1812-1814 eruptions produced smaller drops. Across the whole planet, average temperatures fell by 0.4 to 0.7 degrees. European summer temperatures in 1816 were the coldest on record between 1766 and 2000. Even so, the volcanoes were acting on a planet that had been cooling for centuries.

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• 3. Older Chills and Echoes

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  The planet had been getting colder since the 14th century. That long cool stretch, known today as the Little Ice Age, was already straining European farms before Tambora erupted. The volcano arrived near the end of it and deepened a chill that was already in place. The sun may have played a part too. The Dalton Minimum, a period of low solar activity, ran from 1790 to 1830. In May 1816 the Wolf number, a standard measure of solar activity, hit 0.1, the lowest since records began. Researchers do not yet know whether or how solar changes affect climate, so the match proves nothing on its own.

  Huaynaputina in Peru erupted in 1601, and that year became the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere in six centuries. It began with a bitterly cold winter and ended with a cool, wet summer. The Russian famine of 1601-1603 is linked to it. Iceland's Laki was responsible for up to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the Northern Hemisphere, more than 25,000 of them in England. It also brought one of the coldest winters ever recorded in North America, in 1783-1784. The poverty and famine that followed may have contributed to the French Revolution in 1789.

  Later eruptions repeated the pattern. After Krakatoa in 1883, Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures dropped by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius. California then had one of its wettest rainy seasons on record in 1883-1884. After Mount Pinatubo in 1991, every month of 1992 except January and February ran colder than normal in the United States. The American Midwest then suffered major flooding in the spring and summer of 1993.

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• 4. Europe Goes Hungry

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  Historian John D. Post called the crisis of 1816 "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world". Western Europe was among the places hit hardest, along with New England and Atlantic Canada. The continent was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, and crops had already been poor for several years after the earlier eruptions. Tambora delivered the final blow, and Europe suffered its worst famine of the century.

  In the United Kingdom and in Bourbon Restoration France, hardship became widespread. Low temperatures and heavy rain ruined harvests in Great Britain and Ireland. Northern and southwestern Ireland went hungry after the wheat, oat, and potato crops all failed. The Central England temperature record, kept since 1659, ranks 1816 as the eleventh coldest year, with the third coldest summer and the coldest July.

  Food prices climbed sharply across the continent. Nobody knew why the weather had turned, so hungry crowds gathered in front of grain markets and bakeries. Riots broke out in many cities. Riots were common in lean years, yet those of 1816 and 1817 were the most violent on the continent since the French Revolution.

  Typhus epidemics between 1816 and 1819 struck parts of Europe, including Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, and Scotland. The famine set them off. More than 65,000 people died as the disease spread out of Ireland.

  Hungary saw snow tinted brown by volcanic ash, and northern Italy had red snow throughout the year. Major rivers flooded, and August brought frost. Flooding on the Rhine blocked navigation, including the shipping of grain.

  In German-speaking lands, prices rose, particularly inland, and only Württemberg saw deaths exceed births. Emigration caused a greater loss of population than excess deaths did. Austria avoided famine. In Switzerland, hunger stayed in the densely populated and more industrialized east. Scandinavia and the northern Baltic had almost normal harvests, as did eastern Europe and western Russia. Emperor Alexander I of Russia was even able to donate grain to western Europe.

  In western Switzerland, the summers of 1816 and 1817 were so cold that an ice dam formed below a tongue of the Giétro Glacier in the Val de Bagnes. A lake grew behind it. Engineer Ignaz Venetz worked to drain it, but the dam collapsed in June 1818. The resulting flood killed forty people.

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• 5. New England Frost

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  A persistent "dry fog" hung over parts of the eastern United States in the spring and summer of 1816. It reddened and dimmed the sun so much that sunspots could be seen with the naked eye. Neither wind nor rain cleared it. Clive Oppenheimer later described it as a "stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil". The sky left other traces too. In April and May, Maryland saw brown, bluish, and yellow snow, colored by volcanic ash.

  The cold itself was not the main trouble for people used to long winters. The damage came through crops, food, and firewood, and it was worst at higher elevations where farming was hard even in good years. In May, frost killed most crops in the high country of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and upstate New York. Late in June, Cape May, New Jersey, recorded frost five nights in a row. Fruit and vegetables survived in New England, but corn ripened so badly that no more than a quarter was usable as food. Much of it was moldy and unfit even for animals.

  Diaries preserve the mood. Sarah Snell Bryant of Cummington, Massachusetts, wrote simply, "Weather backward." At the Shaker Church Family near New Lebanon, New York, Nicholas Bennet wrote in May that "all was froze" and that the hills were "barren like winter". Temperatures fell below freezing almost every day that month. The ground froze on the 9th of June, and on the 12th the Shakers replanted crops the cold had destroyed. By the 7th of July, all of their crops had stopped growing.

  Edward Holyoke, a Salem, Massachusetts, physician who kept weather records and studied the stars as an amateur astronomer, was in Franconia, New Hampshire, on the 7th of June. He wrote: "exceedingly cold. Ground frozen hard, and squalls of snow through the day. Icicles 12 inches long in the shade of noon day." By the 21st of August he recorded an abrupt change from summer to winter, as a meager bean and corn crop was killed. "The fields," he wrote, "were as empty and white as October." Frost returned to the Berkshires on the 23rd of August, as it did across much of New England and upstate New York.

  In July and August, lake and river ice appeared as far south as northwestern Pennsylvania. Frost reached Virginia on the 20th and the 21st of August. Temperatures swung wildly, sometimes dropping from as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit to near freezing within hours. Thomas Jefferson, retired to his estate at Monticello, lost crops and sank further into debt. On the 13th of September, a Virginia newspaper reported corn crops one half to two-thirds short. It lamented that "the cold as well as the drought has nipt the buds of hope". A Norfolk newspaper complained in the middle of July that the sun had been mostly hidden for nearly three months. The fireside, it said, had become "a desirable retreat".

  Oats cost 12 cents a bushel in 1815 and 92 cents in 1816. With few roads or navigable inland waterways and no railroads, importing food was prohibitively expensive in most of the country. Massachusetts historian William G. Atkins noted that railroads had not yet opened the granaries of the great west, so people had to rely on what they or their neighbors could produce.

  Quebec ran out of bread and milk, and Nova Scotians boiled foraged herbs to eat. Many families began to look for somewhere better to farm.

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• 6. Monsoons and Droughts

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  In the Yangtze Valley, the monsoon season was thrown off, and overwhelming floods followed. At Fort Shuangcheng, frost disrupted the fields and conscripts deserted. Summer snow or mixed precipitation was reported in various places in Jiangxi and Anhui. In Taiwan, snow fell in Hsinchu and Miaoli, and frost struck Changhua. A large-scale famine in Yunnan helped reverse the fortunes of the ruling Qing dynasty.

  India's trouble ran the other way. The summer monsoon arrived late, and then came torrential rains that aggravated cholera. The disease spread from a region near the Ganges in Bengal as far as Moscow. In Bengal, abnormal cold and snow were reported during the winter monsoon.

  Japan escaped the worst. The country was still cautious after the Great Tenmei famine of 1782-1788, which was also tied to cold weather. In 1816, cold damaged crops, but no crop failures were reported and the population was not harmed.

  Africa left a thinner record. No direct evidence has turned up for the Sahel, though surrounding areas suggest above-normal rainfall. Coastal West Africa below the Sahel likely had less rain than usual. Severe storms hit the South African coast during the Southern Hemisphere winter. On the 29th and the 30th of July 1816, a violent storm near Cape Town brought forceful northerly winds and hail. It caused severe damage to shipping.

  A British newspaper printed an account from Pernambuco, dated the 8th of February 1817, that arrived by a ship at Liverpool. It described an uncommon drought across tropical Brazil, in the stretch between Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro. Streams had dried up, cattle were dying, and people were moving to the banks of the great rivers in search of water. Mills had stopped, and with no windmills, no corn could be ground. Ships had been sent from Pernambuco to the United States to fetch flour. Fear of war with Buenos Ayres had also interrupted the coastal trade.

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• 7. Ghost Stories and Red Skies

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  In June 1816, "incessant rainfall" during a "wet, ungenial summer" trapped Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and their friends indoors at Villa Diodati for much of their Swiss holiday. They passed the days with wine, laudanum, which is a tincture of opium, and long intellectual conversations. Mary Shelley remembered those days fondly. A collection of German ghost stories they had read led Lord Byron to propose a contest to see who could write the scariest story.

  Mary Shelley's entry became Frankenstein. After listening intently to one of those conversations, she awoke with an image of Victor Frankenstein kneeling over his monstrous creation. Byron wrote "A Fragment", which Polidori later used as inspiration for The Vampyre, a precursor to Dracula. Byron also wrote the poem "Darkness", inspired by a single day when "the fowls all went to roost at noon and candles had to be lit as at midnight". Its imagery closely resembles the conditions of that year.

  Haze from the volcanic tephra hung over the sky for several years after the eruption and painted sunsets in rich reds. Paintings made before and after seem to confirm that such reds were absent earlier. They also show moodier, darker scenes, even in the light of the sun and the moon. Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea, from around 1808-1810, and Two Men by the Sea, from 1817, are cited as showing this shift of mood.

  A 2007 study of paintings made between 1500 and 1900, around the times of notable volcanic events, found a link between volcanic activity and the amount of red paint used. The same phenomenon was observed after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and on the West Coast of the United States after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Spectacular sunsets are visible in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. They may have given rise to the yellow tinge that dominates works such as his Chichester Canal, from 1828.

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• 8. Roads West

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  According to historian L. D. Stillwell, Vermont alone lost between 10,000 and 15,000 people in 1816 and 1817. That erased seven previous years of population growth. Among those who left were the family of Joseph Smith, who moved from Norwich, Vermont, to Palmyra, New York. That move set in motion the events that ended with Smith founding The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  Many thousands of people left New England for western New York and the Northwest Territory, hoping for a milder climate, richer soil, and better growing conditions. The crop failures may have shaped the settlement of the Midwestern United States. Indiana became a state in December 1816, and Illinois followed two years later. British historian Lawrence Goldman has suggested that migration into the burned-over district of upstate New York was responsible for centering the abolitionist movement in that region.

  The shortage of oats to feed horses may have inspired the German inventor Karl Drais to look for new ways of travelling without horses. His research led to the draisine and the velocipede, a precursor of the bicycle.

  Justus von Liebig, a chemist, had lived through the famine as a child in Darmstadt. He later studied plant nutrition and introduced mineral fertilizers, a remedy aimed at the soil rather than the sky.

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