THE LITTLE (VOLCANIC) ICE AGE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 16

nineteenth-century European imagination as a readymade symbol for the wave-upon-wave of
social crises ordinary people experienced first as an upsurge of violence near at hand: in dead
bodies on the street, soldiers pillaging farms, or smashed windows in the market square. The
destructive spasms of the erupting volcano seemed the most apt image for the unprecedented
bloodletting and upheaval that swept civilian Europe in the decades after 1790.
THE 1810S: COLDEST OF THE COLD
While Vesuvius stood tall in the European imagination, it nevertheless had no impact
whatever on global climate. Its intermittent eruptions were orders of magnitude too small.
How ironic, then, that Europeans of the late 1810s, distracted by their Vesuvian sideshow, re-
mained oblivious to the planet-wide volcanic crisis through which they lived. Given the state
of science and communications, however—no steamships or telegraph, let alone satellites—it
is no surprise they failed to “teleconnect” the dots.
Tambora's violent impact on global weather patterns was due, in part, to the already un-
stable conditions prevailing at the time of its eruption. A major tropical volcano had blown
up six years prior, in 1809. This cooling event, hugely amplified by the sublime Tambora in
1815, ensured extreme volcanic weather across the entire decade. We have seen that the his-
torical record surrounding Tambora's eruption is slim: a scattering of reports from Raffles's
lieutenants and translated stanzas from a Sumbawan poem are all we have. So obscured from
human view is Tambora's immediate predecessor, however, that even its location remains a
mystery. The historical fact of the eruption scientists refer to as the 1809 Unknown was only
established through the technology of ice core analysis developed in the 1960s. 10
Ice cores are cylinder-shaped records of annual snowfall, dating back thousands of years,
extracted from glaciers and ice sheets at the planet's peaks and poles. These glittering sheaths
of ice are among the most beautiful natural artifacts ever to be subject to scientific scru-
tiny—and the most important. Even given the bone-chilling requirements of their extraction,
it is difficult not to envy the scientist whose task it is to unlock the climatic secrets of a giant
ice core, suffused with tiny bubbles and dancing with blue light. While the Shelleys and their
peers contemplated the work of centuries among the ruins of Pompeii, modern paleoclimato-
logists see millennia stretched out before them in perfect Apollonian torsos of glacial ice.
A paper published in 1991, based on ice core evidence from both poles, announced the
surprising presence of a rich sulfate deposit corresponding to the 1810 and 1811 snowfalls,
indicative of a major tropical eruption comparable in size to the famous Krakatau eruption
of 1883 (a magnitude approximately half that of Tambora's). 11 A subsequent ice core study,
based on sulfate deposits across the Greenland ice sheet, rated the 1809 Unknown the third
largest eruption since the early 1400s, behind only Tambora and the eruption of Mount
Kuwae on Vanuatu in 1452. 12 Certainly, many parts of the globe felt its cooling impact the
following year. In parts of England, the first days of May 1810 were the coldest in living
memory, bitten with late frosts, while the lowlands hills of Scotland remained eerily white
through the spring. In Manchester, morning May temperatures slipped 5 degrees below freez-
ing. 13 Such extreme, unseasonal cold was unheard of and would not be felt again until the
disastrous volcanic summer of 1816.