ICE TSUNAMI IN THE ALPS - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 85

CHAPTER SEVEN
ICE TSUNAMI IN THE ALPS
While John Barrow peddled his theories of global warming to a gullible Admiralty in late 1817,
others put a more commonsensical gloss on the cold, violent weather of the Tambora peri-
od. The world was getting permanently colder across the entire hemisphere: a frightening age
of glaciation was underway. In a long essay baldly titled “Climate,” a writer for the Morning
Chronicle in London reflected gloomily on the deteriorating atmosphere:
In America, as well as in Europe, the climate and temperature of the air seem to have under-
gone an equal vicissitude within the last few years. The changes are more frequent, and the
heat of the sun is not so early or so strongly experienced as formerly … verify[ing] the theory
of those observers of nature, who have said that the extreme cold of the north is gradually
making encroachments upon the extreme heat of the south.
Contra Barrow, this writer interprets the increased presence of ice floes in southerly latitudes
as evidence that the polar ice cap is rapidly expanding , not breaking up. In addition to the au-
thority of reliable “observers of nature,” the author draws his readers' attention to “authentic
reports of the best informed travellers” to the Alps, where the glaciers “continue perpetually to
increase in bulk.” An obvious connection must exist, he argues, between the increase in polar
ice and the menacing advance of Alpine glaciers.
The Chronicle 's climate prognosticator fears the worst and concludes his article with a gen-
eral appeal to the authorities to “make every effort, to which human ingenuity and strength
are competent … for the purpose of counteracting the growing evil.” Because he views the
deteriorating climate in hemispheric terms, the writer advocates international cooperation. As
a starting point, he suggests, the navies of the world might usefully combine to “navigat[e]
these immense masses of ice into the more southern oceans.” 1 While John Barrow dreamed of
sending his heroic officers on a northward cruise into balmy polar seas in 1817, our author
charts a diametrically opposite course for the British navy. Their post-Napoleonic mission? To
chaperone titanical icebergs in the direction of the tropics.
“THE RACE OF MAN FLIES FAR IN DREAD”
“The best informed travellers” the London journalist quotes regarding Swiss glaciers in 1817
could not have included the obscure continental tourists Mary and Percy Shelley. But the Shel-
leys, on a tour of the Alps in July 1816, were keen eyewitnesses to the alarming glaciation of
the Tambora period, and their imaginative reflections on the subject have long outlasted those
of the Morning Chronicle 's sources. In the summer of 1816, the Shelleys entered an Alpine land-
scape in the throes of atmospheric cooling wrought by Tambora's eruption half a world away.
As we have seen, the average Swiss temperatures for the summer months that year reached his-
toric lows, around 14°C. The summer's maximum “warmth” in July and August was barely that