The Year Without a Summer: 1816

1816: The Coldest Year in Memory

June brought snow to New England. Frost in July killed harvests across France. August temperatures dropped below freezing in Germany. Across the Northern Hemisphere, the weather was wrong in ways that people had never seen before and could not explain.

Grain prices tripled. Bread riots broke out across Europe. Famine spread across multiple continents. Tens of thousands died. The 1816 famine triggered one of the largest migrations in American history up to that point, as people abandoned New England for the Midwest.

The Cause: Mount Tambora

The cause was 10,000 miles away. In April 1815, Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa had erupted — the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history. The explosion was heard 2,600 kilometres away. Approximately 71,000 people died in Indonesia from the eruption itself and the immediate aftermath.

But Tambora's global effects were only beginning. The eruption blasted an estimated 100 cubic kilometres of ash and sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. These particles circled the globe, blocking sunlight and reducing temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere by up to three degrees Celsius. The effect persisted through 1816 and into 1817.

The People Who Never Knew

The people who starved in 1816 had never heard of Tambora. The connection between the Indonesian eruption and the European famine was not established until 1920, when the climatologist William Humphreys identified the relationship between large volcanic eruptions and temporary global cooling.

A single event on the other side of the world, invisible to the people it affected, reshaped the lives of hundreds of millions of people who had no idea it had happened.

The Broader Impact

The Year Without a Summer contributed to conditions that influenced Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, prompted Lord Byron to write the poem Darkness, and accelerated the development of the bicycle as horses became too expensive to feed during the grain shortages. It was a pivotal year in ways that rippled out far beyond the immediate agricultural disaster.