Mount Tambora’s Eruption Was So Powerful Europe Went Into 'Volcanic Winter' With No Summer in 1816

One of nature’s fury, volcanoes sometimes erupt without any warning, damaging landscapes and acting as a dire reminder that Earth is still very much alive deep beneath our feet. Be it lava fountains or ash-choked skies, humans have witnessed it all. But once in a blue moon, an eruption rises above the rest, scarring human civilization forever, stated History. One such event, though often overshadowed by the modern disasters, was so deadly, so lethal that it shook the entire planet to its core—literally.

The disaster began quietly, as most great disasters do. In early April 1815, Mount Tambora, a long-dormant volcano on Indonesia’s Sumbawa Island, startled rumbling. Then, on April 10, it exploded in a way never seen before in history. The volcano was so fierce that it threw ash 20 miles into the sky, raining down molten rock and darkness over anything nearby. Villages were erased in seconds. Forests were turned to charcoal, stated History. The destruction continued, and the lava made its way into the sea, creating brand new coastlines as it destroyed the old existing ones. The mountain itself collapsed, going down from 14,000 to 9,000 feet, forming a humongous crater.

The aftermath of this disaster was bone chilling—at least 10,000 people in Sumbawa ceased to exist due to the eruption. But this was not the end. Tambora’s epic destruction was not limited to fire— it went on and continued with famine, plague, and ice. Over the next few months, more than 80,000 people across the Indonesian archipelago died from starvation and disease, as crops failed and drinking water became poison. The destruction was not just in Southeast Asia. Tambora released 100 cubic kilometers of ash, rock, and gas into the atmosphere—ten times more than Krakatoa decades later, stated Science.smith.edu.

This led the global temperature to drop by 3°C and triggered what experts labeled a  "volcanic winter." In 1816, snow fell in June in New England. Rivers froze in July in Pennsylvania. Moreover, Europe, still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, was pushed into the "Year Without a Summer." Food riots erupted from France to Ireland, where crop failure and typhus led to tens of thousands of deaths. The eruption even molded culture. Confined indoors by the saddening weather on  Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley began writing ‘Frankenstein,’ while Lord Byron wrote the apocalyptic poem ‘Darkness,’ stated Smithsonian Magazine.

Oceanographer Henry Stommel and his wife, Elizabeth, wrote in their 1983 book, "The summer of 1816 marked the point at which many New England farmers who had weighed the advantages of going west made up their minds to do so." Moreover, as per a 1992 collection of scientific studies, "...rather sudden and often extreme changes in surface weather after the eruption of Tambora, lasting from one to three years," stated Smithsonian Magazine. As if this were not enough, Arctic ice melted temporarily due to the heat, renewing Britain’s long-lost obsession with the Northwest Passage. The aftermath of this disaster bled through ecosystems and economies.