Tambora and the year without a summer
The largest eruption in recorded history causes crop failure across the northern hemisphere.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 266 days
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Tambora erupts in Indonesia in April 1815, killing perhaps 70,000 directly and injecting enough sulphate into the stratosphere to cool the planet. 1816 brings summer snow in New England, failed harvests and famine across Europe, and the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world. Confined indoors by the weather at Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein.