IStock Photo 12123847 © Himagine

The stratospheric plume of ash ejected by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Mt. Eyjafjallajökull has caused an unprecedented, international disruption: even as flights resume, the volcano continues to spew. If a prolonged eruption sets off a nearby volcano, the Katla, as it usually does, the combined emitted sulphur dioxide could cause a temporary worldwide dip in temperature. When that happened in 1783-84, the Mississippi froze almost all the way to the Gulf.

Even worse was “The Year Without Summer,” the worst volcanic winter of modern times…

It is 1816. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his eventual wife, Mary, meet their friend, fellow poet Lord Byron, outside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The party keeps indoors much of the time, staying up nights reading ghost stories and discussing, among other things, galvanism—the contraction of muscles by applying electric current—and the reanimation of dead tissues. Byron declares a contest to see who can write the best horror story. Mary Shelley's contribution, later fleshed out into a novel, is Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. She is 18 years old (Also present is Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, whose contribution is called “The Vampyre.” It is the first vampire story written in English).

At the same time, in Norwich, Vermont, farmers Joseph Smith Sr. and his wife, Lucy, are deciding to move west. Multiple crop failures have hurt their already ailing finances, and the summer of 1816 is the third, and worst, failure of all. The Smiths move to Palmyra, New York. It is there that their son, Joseph (who is 11 years old), will one day have visions of golden tablets and an angel named Moroni. He will go on to move farther westward, and found a movement called Mormonism.

In Germany, also in 1816, a shortage of oats, and so horses, leads a forestry official, Karl Drais, to invent what he called the “Laufmaschine,” or “running machine.” It is a horseless conveyance with two wheels. One rides it by pushing with one's feet, and relying on momentum to stay balanced. Later innovators would add pedals and chains—today, the device is known as the bicycle.

Most Europeans and Americans were unaware of any of these things, because in 1816 they were freezing to death.

A year before, Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, experienced a super-colossal eruption, directly killing an estimated 71,000 people. Scientists today consider it the most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history, rating it a 7 (“super-colossal”) on the Volcanic Explosivity Index—7 indicates it ejected more than 100 cubic kilometers of ash and debris. Thousands of tons of ash and sulfur (which reflects sunlight) entered the stratosphere, blanketing the skies. This, along with ejecta from several other large eruptions, would alter the Earth's weather for over a year. As a result, 1816 became known as the Year Without Summer.

That year, New England, Europe, and China experienced snow in June, with frost lasting through August. In many places, snow fell every month of the year. Crop failure was widespread, and much of the world experienced famine, riots, and a high incidence of disease (typhus, for instance, broke out in Ireland). Many were forced to eat rats, or roots.

Today, it should be noted, the odds a person will be killed by natural cold in a year are only 1 in 11,110,000 in the US. On average, around 27 people freeze to death each winter. But in New England in 1816-17, the odds were even greater. The winter, when it came, was an extraordinarily cold one. Thousands froze. Temperatures in New England dropped as low as -26˚ F, and New York Harbor froze so hard that sleighs could be ridden from Brooklyn to Governor's Island across a quarter mile of ice. Tree rings of the time were also affected. Wines made in that year were considered undrinkable. Some thought that the sun was extinguishing, and the world ending.

Others felt a shiver of inspiration. Mary Shelley stayed indoors, out of the “wet, ungenial summer,” and began writing. Joseph Smith, dreaming of angels, moved west, his family's crops killed in the summer by snow. And Karl Drais began to hammer at a pair of iron wheels. All during the Year Without Summer, or, as it was popularly known, “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.”