LONDON: The island of Sumbawa in what is now Indonesia began to crack apart 200 years ago this week. On 10 April 1815, an explosion that could be heard a thousand miles away announced the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Mount Tambora, once among the highest peaks in the East Indies, was blown in half. Thousands in the immediate vicinity were killed by lava, wind, ash, fire and tsunamis, but the volcano’s effects echoed far further and longer. The force of the explosion catapulted millions of tonnes of sulphur miles upwards into the stratosphere where it was held aloft. A haze encircled the planet, providing it with a temporary sunshade. Over the next three years, Tambora cooled the surface of the planet by a degree celsius.
In Europe and America, crops failed, diseases flourished and riots and famine broke out. The year 1816 became known as the “year without a summer”. Farmers, philosophers, artists and writers struggled to make sense of their new weather. In a recent book Gillen D’Arcy Wood describes the indelible mark the volcano has left on our culture. In England, Constable and Turner used unusual quantities of red paint as they reproduced the vivid volcanic sunsets. In June 1816, as snow fell in New York, four friends on the shores of Lake Geneva were kept inside by relentless rain and storms. The ghost stories that they told one another led to Tambora’s most famous cultural offshoot, Frankenstein. Mary Shelley described in her introduction the “wet, ungenial summer” that inspired her parable of irresponsible science, which she subtitled “The Modern Prometheus”.
