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man community: “The race / Of man, flies far in dread; his work and dwelling / Vanish.”
Shelley's great poem, at once a celebration of human creative powers, is haunted at the same
time by the specter of universal glaciation, which would bring about an historical end to all
human “works,” including, inevitably, Shelley's own poetry. Hence the mood of gloom from
which the poem never quite escapes.
Percy Shelley's “Mont Blanc”—like the atmosphere of icy doom in volume 2 of Mary Shel-
ley's Frankenstein —preigures the glacial disaster that took place two summers after their
Alpine tour along the same chain of mountains. The catastrophic inundation of the Val de
Bagnes in June 1818, which destroyed villages and farmland across one of the most pictur-
esque valleys of the Alps, was a singular geoclimatological event, being the remote conse-
quence of a volcanic eruption half a world away and three years in the past. In an uncanny
way, the Val de Bagnes flood reenacted the destruction of the Sanggar peninsula on Sumbawa
by Tambora's boiling pyroclastic flows in April 1815. In the Alpine case the agent of destruc-
tion was instead a “lava” of water, ice, and mud issuing from the unstable mountain gorge.
The link between Tambora and the Val de Bagnes was not, of course, understood at the
time. Now, however, scientists are able to analyze such relationships through the prism of
teleconnection: the complex causal relationships that knit apparently disparate climatic and
geophysical events around the globe. In this chapter I have extended the physical principle
of teleconnection to the world of ideas. In terms of its importance to the history of scien-
ce, the 1818 Swiss debacle was no ordinary natural disaster. The drastic Tamboran cooling
of 1815-18, by extending the range of the massive Giétro glacier and spawning a disastrous
jökulhlaup in the Swiss Alps, imprinted the ghostly image of long-ago glaciation on the pion-
eering mind of Ignace Venetz. From this sketchy intuition evolved, by fits and starts, a found-
ing truth of the modern earth sciences: climate change.
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