“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER” - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 26

Figure 3.5. The number of extreme high-wind days measured in Edinburgh spiked following Tambora's
eruption, as this graph clearly shows. The second spike corresponds to the meteorological perturbance
following Krakatau's eruption in 1883. (Alastair Dawson et al., “A 200-Year Record of Gale Frequency,
Edinburgh, Scotland: Possible Link with High-Magnitude Volcanic Eruptions,” The Holocene 7.3 [1997]:
339).
A week after the memorable night of June 18, Byron and Shelley almost came to grief sail-
ing on Lake Geneva, caught unawares as another violent storm swept in from the east. “The
wind gradually increased in violence,” Shelley recalled, “until it blew tremendously; and, as
it came from the remotest extremity of the lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and
covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam.” By some miracle they found a sheltered
port, where even the storm-hardened locals exchanged “looks of wonder.” Onshore, trees had
blown down or been shattered by lightning. 13
The pyrotechnical lightning displays of June 1816 ignited the literary imaginations of
Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. In perhaps the most famous stanza of Childe Harold's Pilgrim-
age —“Could I embody and unbosom now / that which is most within me”—Byron defines
emotional “expression” itself by the single word, “ Lightning .” Likewise in Frankenstein , Mary
Shelley uses the experience of a violent thunderstorm as the scene of fateful inspiration for
her young, doomed scientist:
When I was about fifteen years old … we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunder-
storm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with
frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted,
watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld
a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from
our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing
remained but a blasted stump. 14
Frankenstein's life is changed in this moment; thenceforth he devotes himself, with maniacal
energy, to the study of electricity and galvanism. In the fierce smithy of that Tamboran storm,
Frankenstein is born as the anti-superhero of modernity—the “Modern Prometheus”—stealer
of the gods' fire.
THE FIRST METEOROLOGIST
Jeff Masters, a professor of meteorology at the University of Michigan, is perhaps the most-
read weather blogger in the United States. In an extensive posting in June 2011, he reflec-
ted on the wave of apocalyptic storms, floods, and droughts of the previous twelve months