The Volcano That Took Summer Away
Tambora erupted on Sumbawa in April 1815. By June 1816, it was snowing in Vermont and the Shelleys were trapped indoors writing Frankenstein.
On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa reached the climactic phase of an eruption that ejected an estimated 37 to 45 cubic kilometres of rock and ash into the atmosphere. Volcanologists rate it VEI 7 — the most recent eruption at that scale, roughly ten times the size of Krakatoa in 1883. About 11,000 people died directly. Famine and disease across Sumbawa, Bali, and east Java killed tens of thousands more.
Sulfur from the column reached the stratosphere and formed an aerosol veil that reflected sunlight back into space. Global average temperatures dropped by roughly half a degree Celsius — enough to derail a growing season at high latitudes. The Indian monsoon faltered. Harvests failed in Bengal, where a new strain of cholera moved out of the Sundarbans and began the first global cholera pandemic.
Northern Europe and New England got the worst of the cold. In June 1816, snow fell in Quebec and Vermont. Maine reported lakes frozen in July. Crops failed across upstate New York and New England, food prices roughly tripled, and a wave of migration pushed west toward the Ohio Valley.
That summer, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin (soon Shelley) had taken a house on Lake Geneva. Constant rain kept them indoors. Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Mary's became Frankenstein. Byron's own poem from that summer, "Darkness", opens: I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguish'd.
A volcano on a small Indonesian island rewrote part of the literary canon, broke a year's harvest across two hemispheres, and seeded a pandemic — and was barely connected to any of it at the time.
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