Global impact of 1815 volcanic eruption blueprint for today's climate change
Global consequences of 1815 volcanic explosion could foretell impact of today's climate change, writes Cameron Dueck
by Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Princeton University Press
4 stars
Perhaps the greatest volcanic eruption of all time occurred in 1815, triggering a chain of weather-related strife and suffering that would kill hundreds of thousands of people and give today's scientists a blueprint of the sorry future we may be facing as a result of climate change.
Gillen D'Arcy Wood tells this story with skill and convincing research in Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, bringing together science, historic records and anecdotes from 200 years ago.
The story starts on April 10, 1815, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, when the top 1.5km of Mount Tambora was blown sky-high in the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The explosion left a gaping 6km-wide hole in the earth. Many of the first-hand witness accounts of the explosion and the days following it came from British ships that were plying the waters nearby, and they told a horrific story of destruction, with a four-metre tsunami sweeping villages from the shoreline, and two days of darkness falling within a 600km radius.
Whole villages on the Sanggar Peninsula were buried and wiped from the map, with about 10,000 people dying in the explosion and tsunami that immediately followed. In 2004, archaeologists from the University of Rhode Island uncovered a village buried under three metres of pumice and ash, and their excavations revealed a couple, frozen in time, interrupted in the midst of daily life, just as had been discovered in Pompeii, Italy.
But the worst was yet to come. The suffocating ash destroyed forests, rice paddies and livestock as well as poisoning wells, triggering starvation on a massive scale across the Indonesian archipelago. About 40,000 islanders would die of sickness and starvation, bringing immediate area deaths to more than 100,000 within weeks. Child corpses lined the beaches on nearby Bali, killed by parents who could no longer bear to watch them starve.