1816: The Year Without a Summer, Mount Tambora, and How It Changed History

We recently released our summer forecast, and we are looking forward to a warm one. But what if a summer never showed up at all? Back in 1816, that is exactly what happened. The infamous “Year Without a Summer” was a weather event so devastating that people are still talking about it more than two hundred years later, and the chain of consequences shaped New England migration, agriculture, gothic literature, and the future history of climate science.

What Was The Year Without a Summer?

Referred to by many names, including “the poverty year” and “eighteen hundred and froze-to-death,” the year 1816 was literally a year without a summer across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Throughout not only North America but also Northern Europe and parts of Asia, an exceptionally cold summer, featuring killing frosts in July and August, crippled food production. Crop failures and food shortages were so widespread that rioting and looting became common in the United Kingdom and France, grain prices in Switzerland tripled, and authorities in several European countries declared the year a national famine.

On this side of the Atlantic, many residents of New England and the Canadian Maritimes froze to death, starved, or suffered from severe malnutrition as storms bringing a foot or more of snow hit hard during May and June. Many others from the region pulled up their stakes and moved to western New York, Ohio, and Indiana, where the cold was less severe. In fact, the Year Without a Summer is now believed to have been one of the major catalysts of the westward expansion of the United States.

Though the northeastern section of the continent was hardest hit, southern states still experienced their share of the cold. On July 4th of that year, for instance, the high temperature in Savannah, Georgia, was a chilly 46°F. As far south as Pennsylvania, lakes and rivers were frozen over during July and August. The growing season collapsed: in central New Hampshire, the last spring frost did not lift until June 11, and the first fall frost arrived August 21, leaving farmers about ten weeks of frost-free weather to grow the entire year’s food.

What Caused It?

So, what caused this tragically cold summer? The likely suspect was a series of volcanic eruptions in 1812-1815, capped by the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, believed to be the largest volcanic event of the past 1,800 years. Tambora ejected a tremendous cloud of fine ash and sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, where it formed a layer of sulfate aerosol particles that drifted around the globe within a year. Those particles reflected sunlight back into space before it could warm the surface, dropping Northern Hemisphere average temperatures by roughly 1°F (about 0.5°C) for the next two years, with much sharper localized declines in continental interiors.

The aerosol layer also gave the sky a yellow-orange tinge in many places, which is exactly the palette J. M. W. Turner captured in the lurid sunsets he painted between 1816 and 1818. The same haze warped the weather across India and China, where the monsoon failed, contributing to a cholera epidemic in Bengal that historians now trace back to the disrupted hydrology of that summer.

How the Year Without a Summer Reshaped Culture

Three stuck-indoors months on the shore of Lake Geneva are the reason Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The summer of 1816 was so wet and dark on the European continent that Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Godwin (later Shelley) spent it trapped at the Villa Diodati telling ghost stories by candlelight. Byron proposed the contest; Mary’s nightmare became the novel. John Polidori, also in the room, started the manuscript that became The Vampyre, the direct ancestor of every modern vampire story.

Read how the Year Without A Summer inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

The cold also killed enough horses, mostly for lack of oats, that German inventor Karl Drais built and demonstrated the first running machine (the Laufmaschine) the next year. That contraption is the direct ancestor of the modern bicycle. The Year Without a Summer is, in other words, the reason you can ride a bike to work.

Impact on Farming and Migration

Almost every staple crop of New England failed at least once that summer. Corn refused to ripen anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. Wheat froze in the field in upstate New York. Hay yields collapsed, which meant that even the farmers who managed to harvest something for themselves had nothing to keep their animals alive through the following winter. By the spring of 1817, “Ohio fever” had swept the Northeast, and thousands of New England families joined the wagon trains heading west to land that, mercifully, the volcano had spared.

The cold also resets the cultural memory of what a “normal” summer feels like. For decades afterward, almanacs published “frost dates” that were aggressively conservative, because the people compiling them had lived through 1816. If you would rather work with modern data, our long-range weather forecast and Best Days calendar draw on more than a century of weather records.

Could a Year Without a Summer Happen Again?

Probably, eventually. Volcanologists rate eruptions on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). Tambora was a VEI 7. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines was a VEI 6 and still dropped global temperatures by about 0.9°F for a year. Tropical volcanoes throw more aerosol into the stratosphere than mid-latitude ones, so the cooling is bigger; a VEI 7 in the tropics during a low-solar-activity year would replicate 1816 closely. The geological record shows roughly one VEI 7 event per millennium, so the odds are low in any given decade but very much not zero. The lesson historians draw is less about the volcano and more about the brittleness of food supply chains when the growing season suddenly contracts.

Fortunately, a summer like 1816 has yet to repeat itself, and the Farmers’ Almanac’s outlook for this summer is much more enjoyable.

Year Without a Summer FAQ

Jaime McLeod

Jaime McLeod is a longtime journalist who has written for a wide variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including MTV.com. She enjoys the outdoors, growing and eating organic food, and is interested in all aspects of natural wellness.

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