Geoscience Reference
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During this driest of Indian Mays, wild fluctuations between excessive cold and record
Asian heat wave, in an era of general volcanic cooling, may be explained by an enhanced
meridional circulation. In the northern hemisphere, Tambora's stratospheric impact promp-
ted an outflow of Arctic air to the temperate zones of Europe and New England, cooling the
landmasses. Meanwhile, on the subcontinent of India, a counterbalancing circulation, pos-
sibly allied with a cyclical El Niño system, produced a northerly poleward flow of tropical air
through Bengal, spawning localized heat spikes and drought. For the suffering Bengalis, the
June rains were inexplicably scanty. Vital tributary streams across the delta dried up, threat-
ening the rice crop. This crippling monsoonal break, lasting until late August at least, is the
longest in the historical record of the Asian subcontinent. A tree-ring study of Himalayan ce-
dars from 2007 shows an “extreme low growth” in trees all across the river basins of northern
India in 1816, an indication of severe moisture stress.
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When, too late, the volcanic retardants in the atmosphere were overcome and the de-
pressed monsoonal machine returned to furious life, the now unseasonal rains it carried
were ruinously extreme. The drought of 1816 subsequently gave way to hundred-year floods,
bringing a second season of failed crops, famine, and misery to Bengal. In September, typic-
ally a month of monsoonal decline, monster storms inundated the delta on a scale remarkable
even in a region accustomed to seventy inches of seasonal rain. Various local disease out-
breaks—designated “Bilious Fever” or simply “Malignant Sore Throat” by perplexed British
doctors—took hundreds of victims. In the 59th Regiment stationed in Jessore, north of Cal-
cutta, as many as a dozen soldiers perished daily, while the banks of the rivers across the
Ganges delta were “covered at all times with the dead and the dying” from the local villages.
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All this, however, was but an overture to the main act of the Tambora climate emergency in
India.
DEATH ON THE GHAUTS
As bad as 1816 had been, 1817 in Bengal began like no other year. January and February
were looked forward to as months of serene weather: cold, clear nights and morning fogs
rising like a curtain onto sunny days freshened by breezes from the great mountains to the
north. But Tambora's second year announced itself instead with clouds and heavy rain. The
winds veered crazily from the north to the east, then to the south, bringing drenching down-
pours. On March 21, an unprecedented hailstorm destroyed the spring grain crop and tore up
orchards of dates, bananas, and papaya all across the fragile alluvial plain.
The disease cholera had been seasonally
endemic
to Lower Bengal since time immemorial.
Traveling the narrow coastal roads of the Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal today, one still
the monsoon arrived three weeks early and delivered further calamitous quantities of rain
to the delta region, the perennial Bengal cholera suddenly appeared out of season, showing
unusual strength and breadth. By August an unprecedented “epidemic” of the disease had
spread among the Indian population. A short month later an official report declared cholera
to be “raging with extreme violence” through both the Indian and European populations of
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