Every year, the negative impact of man on the climate becomes more and more evident. The catastrophic melting of glaciers, floods, forest fires and many other negative phenomena are the payback for the consumer attitude towards our planet. And she is capable of cruel revenge and 1816 can become an excellent illustrative example. This lesson, then still undeserved by humanity, should make us think.
In the entire history of meteorological observations, 1816 was the most anomalous year. It is not in vain called the "Year without Summer" - Europe and North America fell victim to a strong decrease in the average annual temperature, which actually lasted more than one year, but three years, and had a serious impact on humanity.
The cold weather was preceded by another serious disaster. In 1815, the eruption of the Tambora volcano began on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. It was the largest cataclysm of its kind in the history of mankind. The eruption began with an explosion that was heard 2600 km from the island. The amount of volcanic ash and steam was such that pitch darkness fell within a radius of 600 km from the volcano for three days.
The eruption of the Tambor volcano. Artist Rob Wood.
A four-meter tsunami wave struck the coasts of the islands of Indonesia, bringing death and destruction. According to the most conservative estimates, the eruption itself and its consequences cost the lives of 71 thousand inhabitants of the archipelago. But that was not all.
The huge amount of ash that rose into the atmosphere caused the effect of a volcanic winter in the Northern Hemisphere, which took hundreds of thousands more lives in different parts of the planet over the next three years. Simply put, in 1816 the long-awaited summer in the Northern Hemisphere simply did not come.
The eruption of Tambora led to a decrease in the average annual air temperature by 2.5 degrees. It would seem a little, but the consequences were dire. Due to the cold snap in March, spring did not come and the temperature in Europe and America remained winter.
Ice on the Thames in London. 1816 year.
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June and July in most of Europe was marked by frosts, which in some countries, for example, in Germany, were accompanied by severe storms, downpours and hail. The Rhine overflowed its banks, flooding vast territories, and Switzerland was covered with snowfalls several times over the summer. Roughly the same events took place on the North American continent, from Alaska to the Isthmus of Panama.
For three years the Northern Hemisphere did not see the summer heat, which led to crop failures and hunger. At the end of the summer of 1816, grain prices began to rise and by the summer of 1818 they had risen more than 10 times. The Russian Empire was relatively lucky in this respect, which, due to its considerable length, did not suffer so much from the cataclysm. But the wheat and rye purchased in Russia were still in short supply.
Early summer in Antwerp 1816.
For Europe, still not fully recovered from the Napoleonic wars, this was too serious a test. In many countries, against the background of famine, epidemics of typhoid and cholera, as well as popular unrest, began. In some places, the indignation of the masses went beyond ordinary riots and turned into pogroms and open robberies of warehouses, shops and stores, with murders and arson.
In Switzerland, the situation became so tense that the authorities had to impose a state of emergency and a curfew. In one of the most prosperous countries in Europe, people killed each other for food and engaged in looting. In small Ireland, nearly 100,000 people died from hunger and disease in three years.
Summer of 1816 in American Vermont. Artist Greg Harlin (Greg Harlin).
Hoping to escape hunger and unrest, tens of thousands of Europeans left their homes and fled across the ocean to America. They did not know that practically the same problems awaited them there, but aggravated by local social and natural characteristics, for which many were not at all ready.
Asia also felt the consequences of the Year Without Summer. In 1816, a fierce cholera epidemic began in Indian Bengal, caused by a vibrio mutated from climate change. Before the disease, not only local residents, but also the colonial troops were helpless. Almost a third of the British Army personnel stationed in the southern and central states of India did not survive the epidemic.
Nicholas I during the cholera riot on Sennaya Square.
The outbreak of the disease dragged on for many years and captured neighboring and even very distant countries. In 1830-1831, cholera spread to the European part of Russia and killed people without distinguishing between classes. Official statistics say that 200 thousand inhabitants of the empire died, but this figure can be greatly underestimated.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin waited out the most dangerous period of the epidemic in his estate Boldino. The most productive period of the poet's work, "Boldin Autumn", is associated with this global disaster. In Europe, the cataclysm associated with cold, hunger and disease also activated the creative intelligentsia.
Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori spent the cold summer of 1816 in a villa by Lake Geneva, where they were forced to sit locked up due to bad weather and unrest. During this period, the plot of the novel "Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus" by Shelley, the story "Vampire" by Polidori was born. The last work opened the whole era of vampires in literature and inspired Bram Stoker to create his "Dracula". But that was the only positive thing about the three-year cold.
Densely populated China was one of the first to feel the consequences of the disaster. The cold destroyed the rice crops, which meant famine, disease and war for the empire. And so it happened - at first the population began to die from malnutrition and epidemics, and then took up clubs and pitchforks. The "opium wars" broke out, caused by the transition of local agriculture from rice cultivation to the less whimsical opium poppy.
British fleet off the coast of China.
The Celestial Empire, which became a worldwide supplier of opium, was attacked by the British Empire, which was later joined by France. The Opium Wars continued until 1860 and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Thus, the eruption of the Indonesian volcano continued to kill people even after half a century.
The disasters that lasted for many years gave impetus to scientists and inventors. Many of the great minds of the 19th century saw the direction in which to move in order to avoid a recurrence of adversity.
The chemist Justus von Liebig, who almost became a victim of famine in Darmstadt as a child, devoted his life to the study of plant nutrition and created the first mineral fertilizers. The cataclysm also affected technical progress. The mass death of European horses from lack of fodder led to the idea of Baron Karl von Dres, who first patented the bicycle in 1817.
It is quite obvious that in our days the consequences of a massive cooling or warming will be more catastrophic, since they will be distinguished by scale and irreversibility. We are already beginning to pay for our attitude to our planet and, perhaps, soon she will call us to account.