Year Without a Summer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
Year Without a Summer (also known as the
Poverty Year,
Year There Was No Summer and
Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death) was 1816, in which severe
summer climate abnormalities destroyed crops in
Northern Europe, the
Northeastern United States and eastern
Canada. Historian John D. Post has called this "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world"
Most consider the climate anomaly to have been caused by a combination of a historic low in
solar activity and a
volcanic winter event; the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the
Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,600 years.
The unusual climatic aberrations of 1816 had the greatest effect on the Northeastern United States, the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland, and Northern Europe. Typically, the late spring and summer of the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada are relatively stable: temperatures (average of both day and night) average about 6877 °
F (2025 °
C), and rarely fall below 41 °F (5 °C). Summer snow is an
extreme rarity, though May flurries sometimes occur.
In May 1816, however,
frost killed off most of the crops that had been planted, and in June two large
snowstorms in eastern Canada and New England resulted in many human deaths. Nearly a foot (30 cm) of snow was observed in
Quebec City in early June, with consequent additional loss of cropsmost summer-growing plants have cell walls which rupture in a mild frost, let alone a snowstorm coating the soils. The result was regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortalityin short, famine.
In July and August, lake and river ice were observed as far south as
Pennsylvania. Rapid, dramatic temperature swings were common, with temperatures sometimes reverting from normal or above-normal summer temperatures as high as 95 °F (35 °C) to near-freezing within hours. Even though farmers south of
New England did succeed in bringing some crops to maturity, maize and other
grain prices rose dramatically. Oats, for example, rose from 12¢ a
bushel ($3.40/m³) the previous year to 92¢ a bushel ($26/m³)nearly eight times as muchand oats are a necessary staple for an economy dependent upon horses for primary transportation. Those areas suffering local crop failures then had to deal with the lack of roads in the early 19th century, preventing any easy importation of bulky food stuffs.
In China, the cold weather killed trees, rice crops and even water buffalo, especially in northern China. Floods destroyed many remaining crops. Mount Tamboras eruption disrupted Chinas monsoon season, resulting in overwhelming floods in the
Yangtze Valley in 1816. In India the delayed summer monsoon caused late torrential rains that aggravated the spread of cholera from a region near the River Ganges in Bengal to as far as Moscow.
In the ensuing bitter winter of 1817, when the thermometer dropped to -26°F (-32 °C), the waters of
New York's Upper Bay froze deeply enough for horse-drawn sleighs to be driven across
Buttermilk Channel from Brooklyn to Governors Island.
The effects were widespread and lasted beyond the winter. In eastern Switzerland, the summers of 1816 and 1817 were so cool that an ice dam formed below a tongue of the
Giétro Glacier high in the
Val de Bagnes; in spite of the efforts of the engineer
Ignaz Venetz to drain the growing lake, the ice dam collapsed catastrophically in June 1818.
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