Home
At the top of the book pile today: Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year without a Summer, Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel (Newport, RI: Seven Seas Press, 1983). I picked this up at Dennis Kelley's Used Bookstore in Newport, RI earlier this winter, at the same time I picked up Wild America.
The year without a summer has always fascinated me. As a kid I heard it referred to as "eighteen hundred and froze to death". I wondered how in the world a volcano in Indonesia could have affected the New England weather. So, I was quite pleased to find a well-written intelligent book on the subject. I started reading it yesterday. What fun! I can't believe those old New England pastors and farmers and Harvard and Yale presidents kept such detailed weather diaries! I always wondered how we had climatological data going back so far. I never realized it came from handwritten notebooks, in some cases maintained by generations in the same family for years and years. And even the ordinary diaries (off line journals) used in putting this book together are amazing. There's one by a Vermont farmer that details his everyday life and how the weather affected the crops and the sheep and cows and whether he had to wear mittens when he mended the fences and wonderful mundane stuff like that. The weather was such an intimate part of people's lives in the 19th century. Actually it is today too, but we'd prefer not to acknowledge that so we skid off the road or fall on the ice and complain like this is never supposed to happen.
One of the regulars at Starbucks saw me reading it yesterday and asked "Is that about Krakatoa?". That's the 24th century eruption everyone has heard about and it is commonly confused with the Tambora eruption. I explained all that. Then she told me that she felt the shockwave from Mt. St. Helen's when she was working in San Francisco. She thought Mount St. Helen's was a bigger eruption than Tambora. Well, with a 100 times more stuff ejected out of Tambora than out of Mt. St. Helen's, I'd say Tambora was a bigger deal. I haven't read any documented global weather change as a result of Mount St. Helen's but I did read some stuff about weather changes caused by El Chichon erupting in Mexico in 1982. The Stommels mention Mount St. Helen's and El Chichon in their book, so by the time I finish it I'll know more about how they compared to Tambora.
There are slews of volcano links on the web. Tambora and year without a summer show up in just about every volcano related FAQ there is. I selected a couple of links that deal with the global cooling issue fairly clearly. Enjoy.
|
Volcanoes and Global Cooling |
http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/volcano.htm |
|
The Year Without a Summer: Was Tambora responsible? |
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/frequent_questions/grp4/question1195.html |
Home