What Caused The Year Without A Summer In 1816?

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - The Year 1816 was very different from other periods in Earth’s history.

Due to severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F), people living in the Northern Hemisphere didn’t experience any summer.

Volcano eruption. Painting by J.C. Dahl (1788 Bergen - 1857 Dresden. Credit: Public Domain

It was not only extremely cold that year but also very dark, windy, and rainy. These severe climate changes resulted in significant food shortages and challenging living conditions.

It took some time before scientists could finally determine what was behind the climate anomaly and found the answer to their questions on the other side of the planet, at Indonesia’s volcano Mount Tambora.

On April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora started to rumble with activity. Over the following four months, the volcano exploded, and the eruption became the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

The volcano ejected ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, darkening the sky and blocking the Sun from view. Many people lost their lives.

Towns and homes were covered with ash. Smaller particles spewed by the volcano made their way into the stratosphere, and our planet’s temperature dropped three degrees Celsius. The effect was temporary but long enough to cause serious climate problems.

Map of unusually cold temperatures in Europe during the summer of 1816. Credit: Creative Commons, authored by Giorgiogp2

The Year Without a Summer had many impacts in Europe and North America. Frost or a lack of sunshine killed crops, and people had very little food.  Food riots broke out in the United Kingdom and France, and grain warehouses were looted. In Hungary, people experienced brown snow; in Italy, there was red snow.

The year without a summer in 1816 gave an unusual inspiration to writers such as Mary Shelley, her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and poet Lord Byron. They were on vacation at Lake Geneva. While trapped indoors for days by constant rain and gloomy skies, the writers described the bleak, dark environment of the time in their ways.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a horror novel set in an often stormy environment. Lord Byron wrote the poem ”Darkness,” which begins, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright Sun was extinguished.”

Eventually, the climate became stable again.

However, it cannot be denied that such massive volcanic eruptions bring enormous devastation to our planet.

Updated on July 20, 2022

Written by Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com

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