THE YEARS WITHOUT SUMMER
2019 proving cold enough for you? You ain’t seen nothin’.
It’s the bitter spring of 1817 and a mass exodus is underway from New England. By fall, one quarter of the population of New Hampshire will have left the state bound for warmer lands in the south or along the Ohio River Valley well to the west. Hundreds of thousands of yankees are on the move because they cannot endure another year of extreme hardship and famine such that was 1816, the Year Without Summer.
The winter solstice is six week removed here in early 2019. It’s bundle-up time in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer is five months away. Or is it?
Humans alive today have never known a year without summer warmth, such as 1816, which also goes by the name 1800 and Froze to Death. But there have been a few winters in the past, even the quite recent past, that did not give way to spring and summer. And the toll summerless years have exacted on humanity has been appalling.
The icy summer of 1816 was caused by the disintegration of a large volcano on the island of Simbawa off the northern coast of the great island of Sumatra in the South China Sea. A fire mountain by the name of Tambora exploded and vanished from the earth, leaving the upper atmosphere choked with dust and volcanic gases. The veil of particles and highly reflective sulfuric acid bounced incoming sunlight away from the planet, reflecting it back into space. Temperatures dropped dramatically. At Concord, New Hampshire it snowed in July and ice formed on ponds in August. Crops failed all across the northern tier of the globe. Malnutrition and famine gripped portions of North America, Europe, and Asia. In all likelihood, several million of the world’s people perished.
It is little wonder Granite State citizens left for warmer climes as soon as they could muster the journey.
It’s just three decades earlier now, the year 1783, and we are in the great European capital of Paris talking to American diplomat Benjamin Franklin in August of the hottest summer anyone can remember in the city. But there is little joy in conversing because the air is absolutely rank with a stinking dry fog that will lay on Paris and most of Europe and north Africa for nine months. But Franklin, ever the scientist, thinks the foul weather has to do with some distant volcanic eruption. There are those who think he is foolish, but he is right.
On the island nation of Iceland a thousand miles to the northwest, the volcano Laki has torn open along its flank and a 17-mile fissure is now pumping fountains of lava and hideous gases full of sulfur and highly toxic fluorine into the atmosphere. The volcanic fog is so opaque at times that ships cannot leave European ports sometimes for a month. In England, the bodies of farm laborers pile up; the final census of those who died from the horrid weather reaches nearly 50,000.
All across Europe the deaths mount into the hundreds of thousands. In Iceland, one quarter of the people perish and 80 percent of the island’s livestock, too. Acid from polluted rainfall burns the leaves of vegetation in the Scandinavian countries. Fluorine poisons drinking water.
Yet the summer of 1783 remains hot. It is not until the following year that the impact of Laki’s eruption strikes with withering force. For in the summer of 1784, constant chilly, cloudy weather and persistent heavy rainfall lead to catastrophic flooding on the continent and dramatic loss of staple crops. Three years running, crop yields are substantially reduced. The climate-induced stresses on the population of France will lead directly to the French Revolution a few years hence.
Turning back the clock still more, we have arrived in what is now in Central America. The year is 536 A.D. The sun is in the sky but it has all the brightness of the full moon. There is chaos in the streets of the great Mayan temple cities. The air has an unexpected chill to it in this tropical realm and the rains have ceased; corn is not maturing. Corn is the very foundation of the Mayan culture. There must be corn for the multitudes. There won’t be this year nor for much of three decades. The Maya and their culture are to be laid low and won’t rebound fully for several centuries.
In Europe and across the entire Asian continent, the cold descends. The daylight hours are as if dusk for months. Months stretch into years. The Dark Ages have arrived, and the name is apt. The atmosphere remains sullen as an Ilapongo volcano explosion in El Salvador and a far away Icelandic volcanic province disgorge volcanic gases and particles in such voluminous quantities as to draw a shroud over the earth for years. Constantinople, the last stronghold of the Roman Empire, collapses. Starving Mongol horsemen and their families, march out of the high plateaus north of the Himalayas and ride across the entire continent and into Europe in search of food and grazing lands for their herds.
As we sail deeper into the past, other such episodes of cruel cold summers play out until we reach the summer that very nearly put an end to our kind. We arrive in Indonesia 74,000 years ago. Several years earlier, a volcano known now as Mt. Toba exploded in a super eruption that defies description. The single blast that obliterated the peak and created a sixty-mlle long crater lake, turned day into night across the planet for weeks, and the atmosphere would not fully cleanse itself of volcanic debris for decades.
Perhaps at the time, our species numbered a million souls, probably the majority living in Africa. Within a decade only a few thousand humans were all that remained on the entire planet. We know of this frightful population bottleneck because, in our tissues, we can literally trace our once desperate misfortune via the mitochondrial DNA in our cells, passed down the generations in a matriarchal line through our mothers.
So, back here safely in the 21st century, we can breathe easy. Or can we? Only ten years ago, a little pipsqueak volcano in Iceland by the impossible name of Eyjafjallajokull erupted for a month and severely disrupted air traffic over Europe for much of that time. The economic fallout from Eyja amounted to nearly a trillion dollars in lost economic activity on the planet. And in 1990, a big peak in the Philippines, Mount Pinatubo, ejected enough ash and volcanic particles to lower the mean temperature of the planet one full degree for several years.
Now those two final examples can be thought of as bullet dodging. We were lucky those eruptions were not an order of magnitude or more larger. They could have been. Had Eyja erupted for nine months as Laki once did in 1783, it would not be a stretch to say that the European economy would have been pushed to near collapse and global economic activity would have been greatly hobbled as Europe and northern Africa staggered.
I’m looking forward to a bright warm summer, I am. How about you? I venture that the only difference between you and me and our desire for balmy weather is that when I become aware of a mammoth volcano on the planet erupting, I pay close attention. The chances are slim we will face a summer-killer volcano in a human lifetime, but the chances are not zero, they are something on the order of five or six percent.
May I wish you a very early happy and warm summer solstice greeting.
