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Snow Fact #5 – The Year Without Summer
Have you heard of the chilly summer in the 1816?
We’ve had couple of cold summers here in Finland recently and the whole Europe’s been kind of chilly in the summertime. Even if it’s cold and it feels bad to have freezing sensations during your summer holidays, luckily that’s all for us. Things were a bit different in the year 1816, also known as The Year Without Summer. Other well known and grim nicknames for the year are the Poverty Year or Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death. There was snow in June, freezing temperatures in July and frost in August causing huge failures of crops and creating great hunger.
While people didn’t know the cold’s cause at the time, historians now know that the biggest volcanic eruption in the known human history was to blame. In April 1815 on the other side of the world, in Indonesia volcano called Mount Tambora spewed millions of tons of dust and ash into the atmosphere, temporarily changing the world’s climate and dropping global temperatures by as much as 3 degrees.
The eruption size of Mount Tambora may happen every 1 000 year, but when next event like this possibly happens hunger of 1816 scale is easily avoidable. At the time people had no idea what was going on and the couldn’t do anything but wait the weather get better. With the help of science and technology today we can keep the crop growing and houses warm. It’s just going to be little bit chilly in the summer months.
Listen to this podcast from USA Today News and know even more:
