A volcano in Indonesia caused the summer of 1816 to vanish.
In 1815 Mount Tambora erupted in what is now Indonesia, the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years. The next year, snow fell in New York in June, harvests failed across the Northern Hemisphere and food riots swept Europe. Stuck indoors by the rain, Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein.
Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, erupted in April 1815, blasting at least 37 cubic kilometres of material into the atmosphere. It is the most recent confirmed eruption of its size. Ash and gases in the stratosphere dimmed the sunlight, and average global temperatures fell by about 0.4 to 0.7°C. Several smaller eruptions in the preceding years, plus the tail end of the centuries-long Little Ice Age, made things worse.
The effects were felt far apart. In New England, frost killed crops in May and snow fell in Albany, New York, on 6 June. Vermont alone may have lost 10,000 to 15,000 people as farmers headed west; one family that left was that of Joseph Smith, who went on to found the Latter-day Saint movement in New York. In China the monsoon was disrupted, bringing floods in the Yangtze valley, summer snow in some provinces and famine in Yunnan. In India, a delayed monsoon is linked to the spread of cholera from Bengal.
Europe, still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, suffered its worst famine of the century. Harvests failed in Britain and Ireland, food prices soared and riots broke out in many cities, the most violent on the continent since the French Revolution. A typhus epidemic that followed the famine killed more than 65,000 people as it spread out of Ireland. The historian John D. Post called it the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world.
Culture bears the marks too. Kept indoors by a wet summer at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, Lord Byron challenged his friends to write ghost stories, and Mary Shelley produced Frankenstein. Haze from the eruption made sunsets vividly red for years, and a study has linked volcanic activity to redder skies in paintings of the period, including those by J. M. W. Turner. Some even suggest a shortage of oats for horses nudged Karl Drais toward inventing an early forerunner of the bicycle.
Source: Wikipedia — Year Without a Summer · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
