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Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2020 33 min

Yellow River - 1887 Yellow River flood — 1887 Yellow River Flood. Hakai Magazine

11. Pretty Skies and Ugly Weather

Yellow skies typical of the summer of 1815 were caused by Tambora’s eruption, and had a profound impact on the paintings of some contemporary artists such as J. M. W. Turner. Wikimedia

Tambora hurled ash and twelve cubic miles of gasses into the skies, causing extreme weather conditions around the planet. The fine ash dispersed throughout the atmosphere created odd optical phenomena throughout the world. The results included prolonged and brilliantly colored sunsets and twilights that were red or orange near the horizon, and pink or purple above. However, the ashes had other impacts that were not so pretty.

The ash caused a volcanic winter, which lowered global temperatures and turned 1816 into what came to be known as The Year Without Summer. The result was disastrous crop failures and food shortages in the northern hemisphere. The weird weather phenomena reached thousands of miles away, all the way to the eastern United States. There, the spring and summer of 1816 were marked by a persistent dry fog that reddened and dimmed the sunlight. That May, a frost killed off most crops in upstate New York, as well as Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and snow fell as late as June 6^th in Albany, NY. Similar examples of unusual weather were recorded around the world.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.