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Year Without a Summer
The Year Without a Summer, also known as the Poverty Year or Eighteen hundred and froze to death, was 1816, in which severe
summer climate abnormalities destroyed crops in Northern Europe, the American Northeast and eastern Canada. Historian John
D. Post has called this "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world".
The unusual climatic aberrations of 1816 had the greatest effect on the American northeast, the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland,
and northern Europe. Typically, the late spring and summer of the northeastern U.S. are relatively stable: temperatures (average
of both day and night) average about 68-77 °F (20-25 °C), and rarely fall below 41 °F (5 °C). Summer snow is an extreme rarity,
though May flurries sometimes occur.
In May of 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 of snow was observed in Quebec City in early June.
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
(corn) and other grain prices rose dramatically. Oats, for example, rose from 12¢ a bushel the previous year to 92¢ a bushel.
It is now generally thought that the aberrations occurred because of the 5 April - 15 April 1815 volcanic eruptions of
Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (in today's Indonesia) which ejected immense amounts of volcanic
dust into the upper atmosphere.
Other volcanoes were active during the same time frame:
* La Soufrière on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean in 1812
* Mayon in the Philippines in 1814
These other eruptions had already built up a substantial amount of atmospheric dust. As is common following a massive
volcanic eruption, temperatures fell worldwide owing to less sunlight passing through the atmosphere
As a consequence of the series of volcanic eruptions, crops in the above cited areas had been poor for several years;
the final blow came in 1815 with the eruption of Tambora. In America, many historians cite the "Year Without a Summer"
as a primary motivation for the western movement and rapid settlement of what is now Central and Western New York and the
American Midwest. Many New Englanders were wiped out by the year, and tens of thousands struck out for the richer soil and
better growing conditions of the Upper Midwest (then the Northwest Territory). (A specific instance of this was when the family
of Joseph Smith, eventual founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved from Sharon, Vermont, to Palmyra,
New York, in western New York State after several crop failures.)
Europe, still recuperating from the Napoleonic Wars, suffered from food shortages. Food riots broke out in Britain and
France and grain warehouses were looted. The violence was worst in landlocked Switzerland, where famine caused the government
to declare a national emergency. Huge storms, abnormal rainfall and floodings of the major rivers of Europe (including the
Rhine) are attributed to the event, as was the frost setting in during August 1816. A BBC documentary using figures compiled
in Switzerland estimated that fatality rates in 1816 were twice that of average years, giving an approximate European fatality
total of 200,000 deaths.
The eruption of Tambora also caused Hungary to experience brown snow. Italy experienced something similar, with red snow
falling throughout the year. The cause of this is believed to have been volcanic ash in the atmosphere.
In China, unusually low temperatures in summer and fall devastated rice production in Yunnan province in the southwest,
resulting in widespread famine. Fort Shuangcheng, now in Heilongjiang province, reported fields disrupted by frost and conscripts
deserting as a result. Summer snowfall was reported in various locations in Jiangxi and Anhui provinces, both in the south
of the country. In Taiwan, which has a tropical climate, snow was reported in Hsinchu and Miaoli, while frost was reported
in Changhua.
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