The Biggest Ecological Disaster the World Has Ever Forgotten
By Alex Planes
April 10, 2013 |
On this day in economic and business history...
Three great columns of flame rose in the sky over Mount Tambora on April 10, 1815. The long-dormant Indonesian volcano had rumbled to life five days earlier with a thunderous detonation followed by ashfall, a warning to the world. On April 10, the mountain became liquid fire. A monstrous ejection of ash climbed nearly 27 miles into the stratosphere as the volcano's explosive shockwave ripped across the globe. Darkness fell for hundreds of miles as ash spread across the sky, blocking sunlight and suffocating crops. When it was over, more than 36 cubic miles of material had blown into the atmosphere, the 14,000-foot peak had been cut more than 4,000 feet shorter -- and the world was about to experience its last great subsistence crisis before entering a period of explosive population growth.
The Mount Tambora eruption was the largest in recorded history, with roughly four times the energy and 100 times the volume of ejected material as the more famous Krakatoa eruption later in the 19th century. At least 70,000 people died as a direct result of the explosion and its subsequent ashfall. More notably, Tambora was a significant contributing factor to what became known as "The Year Without a Summer" in 1816. That year, global average temperatures dropped by roughly one degree Fahrenheit, with regional drops of five degrees or more recorded in much of the Northern Hemisphere. Snow and ice blanketed temperate areas well into the summer, and wide swaths of cropland failed across Europe and North America, causing shortages and highly inflated prices of most staple crops and thus the worst famine of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans died of starvation and disease brought on by the changed climate.
The Year Without a Summer also had an impact on political and economic transitions already underway throughout the Western world. Beyond mass famine and starvation, which helped give rise to the modern administrative style of government, the cold summer purportedly sped up the settling of the American heartland as farmers and workers fled the cold and failed crops. The event also contributed to the development of the earliest bicycles, which would later inspire the development of motor vehicles. The cold, dreary weather may even have inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the world's first example of science fiction.
Mount Tambora rumbled to life again in 2011, prompting Indonesian government warnings and a minor panic in the global media. It hasn't repeated its 1815 eruption -- you'd have heard about it and seen the change in the sky -- but the devastated caldera remains under heightened scrutiny, and the world waits.
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