WEBVTT - Year Without a Summer 0:00:01.080 --> 0:00:04.000 Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how 0:00:04.080 --> 0:00:13.160 Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. 0:00:13.320 --> 0:00:18.360 I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you 0:00:18.440 --> 0:00:22.280 have heard of Mary Robinett Kal maybe you're a listener 0:00:22.320 --> 0:00:25.840 to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a 0:00:25.920 --> 0:00:29.240 series of novels that are known as The Glamorous Histories. 0:00:29.280 --> 0:00:32.559 And these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So 0:00:32.600 --> 0:00:34.640 if that sounds delightful to you and you have not 0:00:34.720 --> 0:00:38.919 read them, you will probably be delighted because they are 0:00:39.360 --> 0:00:42.600 pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one 0:00:42.920 --> 0:00:46.160 was some of my most recent airplane reading while I 0:00:46.200 --> 0:00:50.120 was on a flight, and that book is called Without 0:00:50.120 --> 0:00:53.519 a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, And in addition 0:00:53.560 --> 0:00:58.320 to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites, 0:00:58.960 --> 0:01:03.480 there's ongoing this cussion about about whether that year's unseasonably 0:01:03.520 --> 0:01:07.760 cold weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is 0:01:07.800 --> 0:01:12.360 not unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold 0:01:12.440 --> 0:01:15.920 like it's snowing in July and all of the crops 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:20.200 have frozen in the ground. So in spite of the 0:01:20.280 --> 0:01:23.200 similarities and their names. I was so absorbed in this 0:01:23.240 --> 0:01:25.520 book that it wasn't until the very end that I 0:01:25.600 --> 0:01:30.240 made the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is 0:01:30.280 --> 0:01:33.000 the same as the real world event the Year Without 0:01:33.000 --> 0:01:37.080 a Summer, which is also a listener request from listener Cecile. 0:01:37.319 --> 0:01:41.080 So Cecil, you can thank Mary Robin at Koal for 0:01:41.080 --> 0:01:43.440 for bumping this to the top of the list, because 0:01:44.319 --> 0:01:47.760 after we landed, I was like, I want to learn 0:01:47.800 --> 0:01:51.960 more about that and what really happened. So this story 0:01:52.120 --> 0:01:56.240 actually starts with a volcano. And the volcano, which was 0:01:56.280 --> 0:02:00.600 Tambora on the island of Simbawa, Indonesia, was probably not 0:02:00.800 --> 0:02:03.520 the only factor in eighteen sixteen of bizarre weather, and 0:02:03.560 --> 0:02:05.880 we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but 0:02:05.920 --> 0:02:09.000 it was definitely a very significant major part of it, 0:02:09.080 --> 0:02:11.880 and it had immediate devastating effects in Asia and the 0:02:11.919 --> 0:02:15.720 tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really 0:02:15.760 --> 0:02:18.400 glossed over when people talk about the Year Without a Summer. 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:24.040 There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens. 0:02:24.680 --> 0:02:27.720 One was suffer Air on St. Vincent Island in the 0:02:27.760 --> 0:02:32.120 Caribbean in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted 0:02:32.120 --> 0:02:35.799 in eighteen fourteen. And then there was an immense explosion 0:02:35.880 --> 0:02:39.160 from Tambora which started on April five, eighteen fifteen, and 0:02:39.200 --> 0:02:42.600 went on for days, with the worst of the eruption 0:02:43.080 --> 0:02:46.480 really getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir 0:02:46.639 --> 0:02:49.919 of Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Lieutenant Governor of Java 0:02:49.960 --> 0:02:53.400 at the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on 0:02:53.440 --> 0:02:56.000 this island in the evening of the fifth of April. 0:02:56.080 --> 0:02:59.280 They were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals 0:02:59.320 --> 0:03:02.600 until the following day. The noise was in the first 0:03:02.639 --> 0:03:07.360 instance almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so 0:03:07.440 --> 0:03:10.120 that a attachment of troops were marched from Joke, Jakarta, 0:03:10.280 --> 0:03:13.600 in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and 0:03:13.639 --> 0:03:16.880 along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in 0:03:16.960 --> 0:03:21.160 quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however, 0:03:21.280 --> 0:03:24.040 a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to 0:03:24.080 --> 0:03:26.200 the cause of the sound, and he goes on to 0:03:26.240 --> 0:03:28.359 say that it sounded so close that they really all 0:03:28.400 --> 0:03:30.960 believed it was a volcano. That was actually much closer 0:03:31.000 --> 0:03:36.800 to them than Tambora. When the eruptions started, eyewitnesses on 0:03:36.880 --> 0:03:41.440 the island of Zimbabwa reported three extremely tall, very distinct 0:03:41.480 --> 0:03:44.560 columns of flame that came up from the volcanoes crater, 0:03:45.080 --> 0:03:47.560 and then they kind of crashed into one another high 0:03:47.640 --> 0:03:51.760 up above it before cascading back down. Stones that were 0:03:51.800 --> 0:03:55.400 on average the size of a walnut also rained down, 0:03:55.440 --> 0:04:00.400 along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in 0:04:00.400 --> 0:04:03.600 the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals 0:04:03.640 --> 0:04:06.520 that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn 0:04:06.600 --> 0:04:11.320 apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora, in case 0:04:11.400 --> 0:04:15.600 you could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge. 0:04:15.840 --> 0:04:18.440 It was much bigger and much deadlier than the far 0:04:18.520 --> 0:04:21.719 more well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy 0:04:21.800 --> 0:04:25.760 years later. People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra, 0:04:25.920 --> 0:04:28.479 which is more than a thousand miles away from where 0:04:28.480 --> 0:04:32.560 it was happening. There was also so much ash in 0:04:32.600 --> 0:04:36.320 the air that it, was, according to reports, dark for 0:04:36.560 --> 0:04:40.960 three days or three hundred miles around the volcano. After 0:04:41.000 --> 0:04:45.360 the eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter. 0:04:45.440 --> 0:04:48.800 It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height, 0:04:49.320 --> 0:04:52.640 dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight 0:04:52.720 --> 0:04:58.320 hundred meters. Not Surprisingly, the island of Simbabwa was devastated. 0:04:58.839 --> 0:05:01.920 More than ten tho Bill died in the eruption itself. 0:05:03.120 --> 0:05:07.000 The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash 0:05:07.080 --> 0:05:10.440 had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters, 0:05:10.480 --> 0:05:14.400 so between twenty and thirty of ash. The ash was 0:05:14.440 --> 0:05:17.200 deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and so 0:05:17.320 --> 0:05:20.719 much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight, 0:05:21.279 --> 0:05:25.080 and a two thousand four archaeological expedition found a village 0:05:25.080 --> 0:05:28.360 that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick. 0:05:29.640 --> 0:05:33.440 Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea 0:05:33.520 --> 0:05:37.599 and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash 0:05:37.640 --> 0:05:40.800 in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep 0:05:40.839 --> 0:05:45.240 and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Zimbabwa's 0:05:45.320 --> 0:05:49.920 princedoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct, 0:05:51.000 --> 0:05:54.159 and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also 0:05:54.200 --> 0:05:56.919 spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island 0:05:57.200 --> 0:05:59.880 as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had 0:06:00.000 --> 0:06:03.920 survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward, 0:06:05.000 --> 0:06:08.320 most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed, 0:06:08.880 --> 0:06:11.280 and as is so often the case when there's such 0:06:11.320 --> 0:06:16.080 a massive natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake, 0:06:16.320 --> 0:06:21.240 including among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry 0:06:21.240 --> 0:06:23.839 that they resorted to eating their horses, which were working 0:06:23.880 --> 0:06:27.680 animals that were necessary for transportation and for work. And 0:06:27.720 --> 0:06:30.839 all of this wasn't limited just to the island of Sumbawa. 0:06:30.960 --> 0:06:34.640 People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash 0:06:34.720 --> 0:06:39.320 killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to 0:06:39.400 --> 0:06:42.560 other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain 0:06:42.600 --> 0:06:45.080 the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing 0:06:45.120 --> 0:06:48.840 their economies and their food supplies to collapse, and many 0:06:48.839 --> 0:06:51.560 of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their 0:06:51.600 --> 0:06:54.640 own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach 0:06:54.720 --> 0:06:58.560 were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll 0:06:58.640 --> 0:07:02.760 in Indonesia are really very but sources generally agree that 0:07:02.839 --> 0:07:06.920 it was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who 0:07:06.960 --> 0:07:10.640 died in the eruption and it's it's aftermath. It took 0:07:10.680 --> 0:07:13.440 more than five years before crops could be harvested again. 0:07:13.480 --> 0:07:17.480 On the most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely 0:07:17.560 --> 0:07:21.480 slow to Government officials wrote that the princedoms of Sumbawa 0:07:21.600 --> 0:07:26.080 and Dambo were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four, 0:07:26.280 --> 0:07:30.440 so we're talking about almost a decade later. Other princedoms were, 0:07:30.480 --> 0:07:34.000 in their words, still quote a desolate heap of rubble. 0:07:35.280 --> 0:07:38.680 The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on 0:07:38.720 --> 0:07:41.640 the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it 0:07:41.680 --> 0:07:46.080 was permanently changed in places. Ash made the ground more fertile, 0:07:46.120 --> 0:07:49.640 but it was also drier, So Bali and Lombox so 0:07:49.880 --> 0:07:53.520 neighboring islands wound up with really bounciful rice harvests a 0:07:53.560 --> 0:07:55.880 few years later, thanks to all the ash and the soil. 0:07:56.440 --> 0:07:59.600 But on Sumbawa, the volcano in the ash destroyed all 0:07:59.600 --> 0:08:03.200 the veted tatian, and the streams and springs that the 0:08:03.400 --> 0:08:07.520 vegetation had been sheltering consequently dried up. So While the 0:08:07.560 --> 0:08:10.320 soil was richer, it was also a lot drier, so 0:08:10.680 --> 0:08:12.920 why it didn't get quite the same benefit as some 0:08:13.000 --> 0:08:17.400 of the other outlying islands did once it had started 0:08:17.400 --> 0:08:22.320 to recover. The dust from the ash spread around the world, 0:08:22.600 --> 0:08:25.720 caused brilliant sunsets, and it also reaked havoc with the 0:08:25.720 --> 0:08:29.080 weather over the following months. In the US, dust in 0:08:29.120 --> 0:08:31.559 the air was reported in the Washington, d c. Daily 0:08:31.680 --> 0:08:36.360 National Intelligencer on May one, eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk, 0:08:36.440 --> 0:08:40.240 Virginia American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the 0:08:40.240 --> 0:08:43.720 Boston Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer 0:08:43.760 --> 0:08:47.520 on July fift which he thought was because of sun spots, 0:08:47.559 --> 0:08:49.640 And while there was a lot of sun spot activity, 0:08:49.720 --> 0:08:51.800 it was almost certainly because of all of the ash 0:08:51.840 --> 0:08:56.800 in the atmosphere. So we're going to talk about exactly 0:08:57.000 --> 0:08:59.880 what that ash caused in terms of the weather after 0:09:00.000 --> 0:09:04.679 a brief word from a sponsor, and now let's get 0:09:04.679 --> 0:09:08.200 back to the slightly less peppy discussion of the year 0:09:08.200 --> 0:09:11.280 without a summer, So to return to Tambora before we 0:09:11.320 --> 0:09:14.480 talk about how this eruption affected the weather in parts 0:09:14.480 --> 0:09:17.440 of the world. We have a couple of caveats. One 0:09:17.720 --> 0:09:21.200 is that the measurement and record keeping related to weather 0:09:21.360 --> 0:09:25.040 statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since all 0:09:25.080 --> 0:09:27.679 of this happened. Most of the places that we're talking 0:09:27.679 --> 0:09:31.520 about did not have any sort of methodical pattern of 0:09:31.760 --> 0:09:34.360 observing the weather and writing it down, which is something 0:09:34.360 --> 0:09:36.680 we pretty much take for granted today. So that means 0:09:36.720 --> 0:09:39.040 a lot of the records that we have are erratic 0:09:39.080 --> 0:09:43.600 and subjective. But there is a ton of documentation overall 0:09:43.679 --> 0:09:48.199 in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries, 0:09:48.240 --> 0:09:52.000 and other documents. So there's so much of it that 0:09:52.080 --> 0:09:55.400 we know just from that part uh that this was 0:09:55.440 --> 0:09:59.719 a real event and not just somebody overreacting about a 0:09:59.760 --> 0:10:04.480 cul snap. Also, we have a lot of documentation about 0:10:04.760 --> 0:10:08.280 eighteen sixteens, whether in North America and Europe and parts 0:10:08.280 --> 0:10:12.080 of Asia. But while it's pretty logical to conclude that 0:10:12.120 --> 0:10:15.040 the weather was completely weird everywhere as a consequence of 0:10:15.080 --> 0:10:19.000 all of this volcanic activity, we have much less in 0:10:19.040 --> 0:10:22.520 the way of actual records from Africa, South America and Australia. 0:10:22.960 --> 0:10:25.000 So when we walk through what we know, it is 0:10:25.040 --> 0:10:28.800 mostly from North American, European and Asian points of view. 0:10:29.559 --> 0:10:33.079 In North America, particularly on the east coast, stretching from 0:10:33.080 --> 0:10:36.080 the Carolinas all the way up through what's now Ontario 0:10:36.200 --> 0:10:39.960 and Quebec, the spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler 0:10:40.000 --> 0:10:43.640 and drier than normal, although there were some big warm 0:10:43.679 --> 0:10:47.280 spells mixed in. Temperatures kind of swung wildly from balmy 0:10:47.360 --> 0:10:51.680 to freezing and back again. Then the summer had three 0:10:51.760 --> 0:10:56.640 extreme cold spells in June, July, and August. The first 0:10:56.720 --> 0:10:59.640 huge cold wave stretch from June five to June eleven. 0:11:00.240 --> 0:11:03.080 Temperatures in New England dropped from the eighties to the 0:11:03.160 --> 0:11:06.120 forties in the wake of a thunderstorm, and that actually 0:11:06.160 --> 0:11:09.960 became the high for the next several days. Eighteen inches 0:11:10.000 --> 0:11:12.920 of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont on the eighth, 0:11:13.679 --> 0:11:16.079 and a hard frost that stretched well into the south 0:11:16.160 --> 0:11:18.720 on the eleventh killed most of the crops that had 0:11:18.760 --> 0:11:22.040 managed to survive up until that point. People started to 0:11:22.080 --> 0:11:26.200 talk about the real possibility of a famine. Within weeks, 0:11:26.200 --> 0:11:30.800 New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot again, breaking one 0:11:30.880 --> 0:11:34.880 hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen all that often, 0:11:35.320 --> 0:11:38.600 especially not this early in the season. Another four day 0:11:38.600 --> 0:11:41.920 cold snap hit eastern North America starting on July six. 0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:46.000 In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops, although it 0:11:46.040 --> 0:11:48.800 was not as snowy this time around. Most of the 0:11:48.800 --> 0:11:50.760 snow reported in the U s was in the mountains 0:11:50.760 --> 0:11:54.280 of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of water 0:11:54.480 --> 0:11:57.800 completely froze over with a layer of ice. This snap 0:11:57.840 --> 0:12:00.920 also reached even farther south was in cold weather and 0:12:00.960 --> 0:12:04.480 frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave. 0:12:06.120 --> 0:12:09.679 The cold weather came back again on August one, causing 0:12:09.720 --> 0:12:13.080 more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts as 0:12:13.120 --> 0:12:16.160 far south as North Carolina and as far west as 0:12:16.240 --> 0:12:20.880 Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point was 0:12:20.920 --> 0:12:23.680 a drought which had affected much of the southern and 0:12:23.720 --> 0:12:27.000 eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half of 0:12:27.000 --> 0:12:29.560 the cotton crop in the south failed because of this 0:12:29.679 --> 0:12:34.200 dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't break 0:12:34.280 --> 0:12:37.360 until September, after the cold weather was over, only to 0:12:37.440 --> 0:12:40.120 be about to start again. Because it was heading into autumn. 0:12:40.720 --> 0:12:43.480 The price of flour rose from four dollars a barrel 0:12:43.520 --> 0:12:47.360 to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel. The wholesale 0:12:47.360 --> 0:12:50.160 price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price of virtually 0:12:50.280 --> 0:12:54.640 every food staple shot up. There was also a huge 0:12:54.760 --> 0:12:58.360 increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern United States 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:01.360 into the West, as people hoped that they would find 0:13:01.440 --> 0:13:05.400 better growing conditions and because the West really hadn't seen 0:13:05.480 --> 0:13:08.640 the kind of unseasonable cold that the East Coast had. 0:13:09.360 --> 0:13:12.920 About twice as many people decided to move west that year, 0:13:13.000 --> 0:13:17.920 as was typical at that point. In several states, including 0:13:17.920 --> 0:13:21.920 New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, people called for 0:13:21.960 --> 0:13:25.280 a ban on distillery because of the grain shortage. When 0:13:25.280 --> 0:13:28.120 people couldn't afford grain to feed their livestock and they're 0:13:28.120 --> 0:13:33.040 working animals, they ate the animals instead. So that was 0:13:33.160 --> 0:13:37.680 North America's eighteen sixteen summer. In Europe, the summer was 0:13:38.400 --> 0:13:41.600 similarly wintry, but it also seemed like it got all 0:13:41.640 --> 0:13:45.240 the rain that North America had been missing. Western Europe 0:13:45.280 --> 0:13:47.920 was the most affected, but crops failed all over the 0:13:47.960 --> 0:13:51.400 continent thanks to the fields being flooded and later frozen. 0:13:52.200 --> 0:13:55.520 Crops that are sensitive to having too much water. Like wine, 0:13:55.520 --> 0:14:00.000 grapes really suffered in their quality when they managed to survive. Plus, 0:14:00.040 --> 0:14:03.319 all the incessant rain made things generally wet and moldy. 0:14:04.400 --> 0:14:07.840 Because horses were the main source of transportation and grain 0:14:07.920 --> 0:14:10.600 became so much more expensive, the cost of travel in 0:14:10.679 --> 0:14:16.920 Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland, 0:14:17.000 --> 0:14:19.880 the government had to distribute information about how to tell 0:14:19.960 --> 0:14:22.840 poisonous plants from ones that were safe to eat as 0:14:22.880 --> 0:14:25.440 people try to scavenge what they could from out in 0:14:25.560 --> 0:14:29.520 the woods or the wilds. In Ireland, a typhus epidemic 0:14:29.600 --> 0:14:33.080 spread in the wake of the famine. The story that 0:14:33.120 --> 0:14:35.160 sticks in a lot of people's minds about how this 0:14:35.520 --> 0:14:38.400 played out in Europe is that the infamous evening in 0:14:38.400 --> 0:14:41.320 which George Gordon Lord Byron proposed that all of his 0:14:41.440 --> 0:14:45.680 guests at his Lake Geneva villa write a story. That's 0:14:45.760 --> 0:14:49.080 the visit in which Mary Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein. 0:14:49.760 --> 0:14:52.800 That all happened in the middle of this cold, wretched summer, 0:14:54.000 --> 0:14:58.240 and also written during this uh was Byron's poem Darkness, 0:14:58.240 --> 0:15:01.280 and that poem begins. I had a dream which was 0:15:01.360 --> 0:15:04.720 not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and 0:15:04.760 --> 0:15:08.880 the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless 0:15:08.880 --> 0:15:12.320 and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening 0:15:12.360 --> 0:15:16.160 in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came 0:15:16.440 --> 0:15:19.560 and brought no day, and men forgot their passions in 0:15:19.600 --> 0:15:23.040 the dread of this, their desolation, and all hearts were 0:15:23.120 --> 0:15:28.720 chilled to a selfish prayer for light in Asia. Moving 0:15:28.720 --> 0:15:30.600 on to the third big place that we have lots 0:15:30.600 --> 0:15:34.800 of information about, the volcano disrupted the monsoon cycle in 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:37.640 India and Korea, so things were dry when they were 0:15:37.640 --> 0:15:40.160 supposed to be wet, and then way wetter than they 0:15:40.160 --> 0:15:43.360 were supposed to be once the rain actually arrived. This 0:15:43.520 --> 0:15:46.640 caused rice crops, which really rely on that monsoon cycle, 0:15:46.720 --> 0:15:50.120 to fail all over. The change in the weather also 0:15:50.160 --> 0:15:53.560 affected which bacteria could thrive in the Bay of Bengal, 0:15:54.040 --> 0:15:57.320 and unfortunately, one species that did thrive was a new 0:15:57.360 --> 0:16:00.320 strain of cholera, which people had less resistance too than 0:16:00.400 --> 0:16:04.560 previous strains. Bengal Colora spread out of India to the 0:16:04.600 --> 0:16:07.480 rest of the world in eighteen seventeen, and the strain 0:16:07.560 --> 0:16:11.240 killed tens of millions of people. There's actually some debate 0:16:11.280 --> 0:16:13.720 in the scientific community about just how much of this 0:16:13.720 --> 0:16:17.160 shift had to do with the volcano and Unon province 0:16:17.200 --> 0:16:20.280 in southwestern China, crops failed in the face of just 0:16:20.320 --> 0:16:24.600 a bitter bitter cold and a much wetter season than normal, 0:16:25.680 --> 0:16:28.720 and the book Tambora, The Eruption That Changed the World, 0:16:28.920 --> 0:16:32.880 author Gillan Darcy would connects this and this massive crop 0:16:32.920 --> 0:16:36.680 failure and famine to the rise of opium growth in 0:16:36.800 --> 0:16:39.920 Union as farmers turned to it in desperation is a 0:16:39.960 --> 0:16:42.200 way to try to just make enough money to survive 0:16:42.280 --> 0:16:45.640 when the rest of their crops had failed. A huge 0:16:45.760 --> 0:16:49.359 famine swept through southwest China and it lasted for years. 0:16:49.960 --> 0:16:53.280 Neighboring parts of China had an influx of refugees, and 0:16:53.560 --> 0:16:58.000 much of the nation faced a serious social unrest. So 0:16:58.040 --> 0:17:00.400 before we talk about some of the theories at the 0:17:00.480 --> 0:17:03.360 time for what was going on, let's have another pause 0:17:03.480 --> 0:17:06.399 for a word from a sponsor, and now back to 0:17:07.280 --> 0:17:11.040 the year without a summer. So, unsurprisingly, there were many 0:17:11.080 --> 0:17:13.720 many explanations at the time for what was going on 0:17:13.760 --> 0:17:17.440 and what was causing this just bizarre weather. These actually 0:17:17.480 --> 0:17:20.879 start with a story about why the volcano erupted in 0:17:20.960 --> 0:17:25.639 the first place. The population of Zimbabwe was largely Muslim, 0:17:25.640 --> 0:17:29.000 and there was a folk tale explaining the event, and 0:17:29.200 --> 0:17:32.360 that was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim 0:17:32.440 --> 0:17:36.160 a dog and then killed him, and the volcanoes eruption 0:17:36.320 --> 0:17:40.520 was an act of divine retribution for that act. A 0:17:40.680 --> 0:17:43.120 range of explanations for the weather cropped up in North 0:17:43.160 --> 0:17:47.359 America and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots. 0:17:47.400 --> 0:17:49.960 As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of 0:17:50.000 --> 0:17:52.679 extremely large sun spots that year, some of which were 0:17:52.760 --> 0:17:56.200 visible to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker 0:17:56.280 --> 0:17:59.280 areas of the sun were colder, which is true, and 0:17:59.320 --> 0:18:02.720 a colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on 0:18:02.760 --> 0:18:05.199 board with this idea, though, since the timing of the 0:18:05.240 --> 0:18:08.119 sun spots did not always match up with the coldest weather. 0:18:09.440 --> 0:18:13.120 There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about 0:18:13.200 --> 0:18:16.160 exactly how much sun spots can affect the Earth's weather 0:18:16.240 --> 0:18:20.320 and climate. Uh And it's partly because this all happens 0:18:20.359 --> 0:18:24.240 on such a huge scale, and the sun spots cycle 0:18:24.359 --> 0:18:28.240 itself is so long that it's almost impossible to isolate 0:18:28.359 --> 0:18:31.359 just sun spots from all of the other stuff in 0:18:31.400 --> 0:18:34.320 the world that's going on while the sun spots cycle 0:18:34.440 --> 0:18:37.000 is peaking. Yeah, you can't really turn off the sun 0:18:37.040 --> 0:18:39.439 to get a control group without it. Yeah, And you 0:18:39.480 --> 0:18:42.160 can't turn off the volcanoes to study just the sun. 0:18:42.280 --> 0:18:45.480 It's so I really tried to find a definitive answer 0:18:45.520 --> 0:18:47.600 of good sun spots I've been and that there's not 0:18:47.680 --> 0:18:52.040 a definitive answer. Another theory at this time is that 0:18:52.119 --> 0:18:55.040 it had something to do with ice in North America. 0:18:55.240 --> 0:18:57.879 I seem to persist in the Great Lakes for longer 0:18:57.920 --> 0:19:00.760 than normal, and a number of ships for poorted huge 0:19:00.800 --> 0:19:04.159 ice floes floating in the North Atlantic. People thought that 0:19:04.200 --> 0:19:07.080 all of this ice was actually sucking the heat out 0:19:07.080 --> 0:19:10.399 of the atmosphere. This is really more of a cause 0:19:10.440 --> 0:19:13.280 and effects situation. There was more ice on the Great 0:19:13.359 --> 0:19:16.960 Lakes because it was colder than normal, uh, But then 0:19:17.000 --> 0:19:19.639 there was more ice floating in the Northern Atlantic because 0:19:19.640 --> 0:19:24.080 this whole time actually caused a warming uh trend over 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:27.320 the poles, and so a lot of polar ice broke 0:19:27.400 --> 0:19:30.480 up and floated away, so that it was more of 0:19:30.480 --> 0:19:34.199 a cause and effects situation than the ice sucking the 0:19:34.240 --> 0:19:37.480 heat out of the air. Also, a series of pretty 0:19:37.560 --> 0:19:41.040 large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth in 0:19:41.119 --> 0:19:45.200 the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather on this. 0:19:45.440 --> 0:19:49.520 The idea was that the Earth's motion had somehow caused 0:19:49.600 --> 0:19:53.080 some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface of the 0:19:53.080 --> 0:19:57.560 Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something broke that equilibrium, 0:19:57.800 --> 0:20:01.560 that there would not be enough war available for crops 0:20:01.560 --> 0:20:06.120 to grow. Other scapegoats that were named as the cause 0:20:06.160 --> 0:20:10.440 of all of these problems Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods. They 0:20:10.480 --> 0:20:13.879 were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather, because you know, 0:20:13.960 --> 0:20:16.280 he did invented them in the mid seventeen hundreds, and 0:20:16.320 --> 0:20:19.840 they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly, since that 0:20:19.920 --> 0:20:22.960 happened before the weather, it must have caused this terrible weather. 0:20:23.960 --> 0:20:30.600 There's so many explanations sound yet there. I mean, we 0:20:30.640 --> 0:20:34.160 still see this today when people don't totally understand something, 0:20:34.200 --> 0:20:36.879 and they'll feel like that because one thing happened before 0:20:36.920 --> 0:20:39.600 another thing, that the first thing caused the second thing, 0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:43.520 and it's often not true at all, Right, It's that 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:50.600 like chronological causality attribution that's not not always valid. So 0:20:50.880 --> 0:20:55.320 the prevailing theory today is that the volcanic activity, including 0:20:55.359 --> 0:20:58.280 that from Tambora and the other eruptions that were mentioned 0:20:58.320 --> 0:21:00.280 at the top of the show, was it lea one 0:21:00.280 --> 0:21:02.679 of the primary contributors. And this was actually something that 0:21:02.720 --> 0:21:04.720 people did discuss a little bit at the time. It 0:21:04.800 --> 0:21:07.280 was certainly not a widespread theory, but there were people 0:21:07.280 --> 0:21:09.320 who were like, you know, maybe all this ash in 0:21:09.359 --> 0:21:12.920 the atmosphere, which is from a volcano is making it colder. 0:21:13.119 --> 0:21:17.080 Like people are pretty smart that way. Um. However, eighteen 0:21:17.160 --> 0:21:20.959 sixteen was not the only year in that time period 0:21:21.040 --> 0:21:24.840 that had weird weather. In general, it was colder than 0:21:24.880 --> 0:21:27.520 normal in a lot of places from eighteen twelve to 0:21:27.560 --> 0:21:31.119 eighteen seventeen, to the point that people took notice, and 0:21:31.240 --> 0:21:34.560 by studying things like ice cores and tree rings and 0:21:34.680 --> 0:21:38.240 that kind of long term documentation that the earth leaves 0:21:38.240 --> 0:21:42.639 of itself, scientists know that this was not really just 0:21:42.680 --> 0:21:45.320 a little five year window of a cold snap. The 0:21:45.400 --> 0:21:48.240 eighteen hundred spell at the end of a relative cool 0:21:48.280 --> 0:21:51.919 snap that lasted around the world for almost five hundred years, 0:21:52.440 --> 0:21:56.120 starting in fourteen hundred and ending in around eighteen sixty 0:21:57.560 --> 0:22:00.320 at least in the US. The year without US Summer 0:22:00.320 --> 0:22:03.960 prompted people to start making more routine observances and recordings 0:22:04.000 --> 0:22:07.800 of weather conditions. The Commissioner General of the Land Office, 0:22:08.520 --> 0:22:11.080 Josiah Meggs, sent out a memo to all of his 0:22:11.160 --> 0:22:15.040 registers at twenty different land offices instructing them to make 0:22:15.080 --> 0:22:18.040 and record a number of observations about everything from the 0:22:18.080 --> 0:22:22.119 weather to animal migrations. The military also started making and 0:22:22.160 --> 0:22:25.399 recording weather observations at the direction of Joseph Lovell, the 0:22:25.440 --> 0:22:28.560 Surgeon General of the Army, and the Patent Office and 0:22:28.560 --> 0:22:31.200 the Smithsonian Institution got in on the action as well, 0:22:31.240 --> 0:22:35.040 and consequently, the first published weather forecasts came out in 0:22:35.080 --> 0:22:38.320 the US in eighteen forty nine. So when I started 0:22:38.359 --> 0:22:40.800 researching this episode, I kind of expected it to be 0:22:40.840 --> 0:22:43.840 a little bit like The Long Winter Part two. So 0:22:44.040 --> 0:22:47.199 we talked about the Long Winter, which Laura Angeles Wilder 0:22:47.240 --> 0:22:51.359 wrote about last time about this time of year, and 0:22:51.440 --> 0:22:55.320 that was the weather was really cold, things were really hard. Uh, 0:22:55.560 --> 0:22:59.040 things were tough, but overall everything worked out okay for 0:22:59.080 --> 0:23:01.040 the most part. And I sort of thought this was 0:23:01.080 --> 0:23:06.000 going to be similar to that. Uh. I was not 0:23:06.200 --> 0:23:10.720 expecting all of the famines and deaths and the extreme 0:23:10.800 --> 0:23:15.040 scale of how deadly the volcano was a lot of um. 0:23:16.000 --> 0:23:17.479 Like a lot of people who have written to suggest 0:23:17.520 --> 0:23:20.600 the topic or other things that I've seen about it, 0:23:20.640 --> 0:23:22.960 kind of go this was a year that had terrible weather, 0:23:23.920 --> 0:23:26.920 a volcano caused it, and the that's sort of all 0:23:26.960 --> 0:23:29.720 that said about the volcano, as though the volcano was 0:23:29.840 --> 0:23:35.199 on an island that was totally uninhabited, right, uh, and 0:23:35.280 --> 0:23:39.359 that is not the case at all. This episode gives 0:23:39.400 --> 0:23:42.320 me um flashbacks to when I was a kid in 0:23:42.400 --> 0:23:45.000 Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in Washington State 0:23:45.040 --> 0:23:48.120 at the time, so I am very familiar with being 0:23:48.119 --> 0:23:52.640 covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near an active volcano, 0:23:52.800 --> 0:23:55.920 so I have not had that experience. Those are wild times. 0:23:56.119 --> 0:23:58.080 I remember my biggest concern, and again I was a 0:23:58.200 --> 0:24:00.639 child at the time, so my biggest concern was that 0:24:00.720 --> 0:24:02.919 all the animals have been killed. I was really upset 0:24:02.960 --> 0:24:05.720