ICE TSUNAMI IN THE ALPS - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 88

inexpressibly dreadful in the aspect of the few branchless trunks which nearest to the ice rifts
still stand in uprooted soil. The meadows perish overwhelmed with sand & stones. Within
this last year these glaciers have advanced three hundred feet into the valley.” 9 The sight
of the expanding glacier brought still another reference to Shelley's encyclopedic mind. The
esteemed French naturalist the Comte de Buffon had proposed that “this earth which we in-
habit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost”—in other words, an Ice Age,
though it would be another two decades before that term—foundational to modern climate
science—was invented. To trace the origins of Ice Age theory to Tambora-era glaciation is the
purpose of this chapter.
Shelley's intuition of Alpine danger in 1816 should be tied to the specific climatic conditions
of that cold Tamboran summer, in which the glaciers neared their modern historical max-
imum and appeared grimly unstoppable: “The race / Of man, flies far in dread,” he wrote.
But what Shelley could not have known was that his fears, in the geological short term, were
needless. The icy augmentation Shelley was witness to, wrought by Tambora's chilling hand,
represented the southernmost glacial extent of the Little Ice Age. The glaciers of the Mont
Blanc massif would never again extend so far as they did for the Shelleys in the Tamboran
period. 10 Two centuries later, our perception of an Alpine crisis is, of course, very different.
With the accelerated global warming of the past half century, Alpine glaciers are now in un-
precedentedly rapid retreat, raising the very real prospect of an ice-free Europe by century's
end, with disastrous implications for continent-wide water systems and agriculture.
Meanwhile, back at the hotel in Chamonix, Mary Shelley's imagination was far from idle.
She considered the Alps “the most desolate place in the world,” which, coming from a true-
born Romantic, was high praise indeed. 11 Their walking tour of Mont Blanc's northside gla-
cier, the Mer de Glace, had put her in mind of the ghost story competition with Byron and
Shelley. She was inspired to “write my story,” as she confided to her journal, and now had
a setting for the opening of topic 2 where she would reunite the unfortunate monster, lately
a murderer on the run, with his unhappy creator. In one of the most gripping scenes of the
novel, Frankenstein embarks on his Alpine tour with the hope of discovering in the majestic
stillness of the mountains some escape from his grief and regret: “My heart, which was before
sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy.” Instead, he finds that the glaciers have be-
come the refuge of his hideous Creature, who waylays him on the vast tundra of the Mer de
Glace: “I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, advancing toward me with superhuman speed.
He bounded over the crevices in the ice.” 12 Mary Shelley's staged gothic encounter on the
Alps in Frankenstein echoes Percy's ambivalence in his poem “Mont Blanc.” Both detect in the
sublime beauty of the glaciated peaks an undercurrent of horror.