“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER” - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 25

ern European weather patterns, had shifted gears to an anomalous positive phase, as if on
steroids.
Both computer models and historical data draw a dramatic picture of Tambora-driven
storms hammering Britain and western Europe. A recent computer simulation conducted at
the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder showed fierce westerly
winds in the North Atlantic in the aftermath of a major tropical eruption, while a parallel
study based on multiproxy reconstructions of volcanic impacts on European climate since
1500 concluded that volcanic weather drives the increased “advection of maritime air from
the North Atlantic,” meaning “stronger westerlies” and “anomalously wet conditions over
Northern Europe.” 8
Back at the ground level of observed weather phenomena, an archival study of Scottish
weather has found that, in the 1816-18 period, gale-force winds battered Edinburgh at a rate
and intensity unmatched in over two hundred years of record keeping. 9 In January 1818, a
particularly violent storm destroyed the beloved St. John's Chapel in the heart of the city. The
slowing of oceanic currents in response to the overall deficit of solar radiation post-Tambora
had left anomalous volumes of heated water churning through the critical area between Ice-
land and the Azores (engine of the Arctic Oscillation), sapping air pressure, energizing west-
erly winds, and giving shape to titanic storms.
It was in this literally electric atmosphere that the Shelley party in Geneva, with the
celebrity poet Byron attached, conceived the idea of a ghost story contest, to entertain them-
selves indoors during this cold, wild summer. On the night of June 18, 1816—a signature date
in literary history—while another volcanic summer thunderstorm raged around them, Mary
and Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Byron, and Byron's doctor-companion John Polidori re-
cited the poet Coleridge's recent volume of gothic verse to each other in the candle-lit dark-
ness at the Villa Diodati. In his 1986 movie about the Shelley Circle that famous summer,
the controversial British film director Ken Russell imagines Shelley gulping tincture of opi-
um while Claire Clairmont performs fellatio on Byron, recumbent in a chair. Group sex in
the drawing room might be implausible, even for the Shelley Circle, but drug taking is very
likely, inspired by Coleridge, the poet-addict supreme. How else to explain Shelley's running
screaming from the room at Byron's recitation of the psychosexual thriller “Christabel,” tor-
mented by his vision of a bare-chested Mary Shelley with eyes instead of nipples? 10
From such antics as these, Byron conceived the outline of a modern vampire tale, which
the bitter Polidori would later appropriate and publish under Byron's name as a satire on his
employer's cruel aristocratic hauteur and sexual voracity. For Mary, the lurid events of this
stormy night gave literary body to her own distracted musings on the ghost story competi-
tion, instituted two nights earlier. She would write a horror story of her own, about a doomed
monster brought unwittingly to life during a storm. As Percy Shelley later wrote, the novel
itself seemed generated by “the magnificent energy and swiftness of a tempest.” 11 Thus it was
that the unique creative synergies of this remarkable group of college-age tourists—in the
course of a few weeks' biblical weather—gave birth to two singular icons of modern popular
culture: Frankenstein's monster and the byronic Dracula. 12