Fascinating lengthy article in the April 24 Wall Street Journal on how the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia caused global cooling that reverberated around the world in ways big and small. The article also compares it to the current Iceland eruption, Krakatoa, Mt. St. Helens and others.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...IDDLESecondNews

* APRIL 24, 2010

Eruptions and Disruptions

Iceland's volcano pales before giants that may have sped U.S. settlers and led to 'Frankenstein'


"...crop failures dotted the northern hemisphere—rice failed in parts of China, wheat and corn in Europe, potatoes in Ireland (where it rained nonstop for eight weeks and triggered a typhus epidemic that killed 65,000 and spread to England and Europe). At Lake Geneva in Switzerland, vacationers from England sat out gloomy June storms reading ghost stories and composing their own. Lord Byron wrote a narrative poem, "Darkness," in which there was no sun, "no day." His personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, wrote "The Vampyre," and Mary Shelley began "Frankenstein." Famine spread across Switzerland. Food riots and insurrections swept France, which had already been caught up in the chaos following Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo.

"In New England, 1816 was called "the year without a summer" because there were crop-killing frosts every month, including the normally frost-free months of summer, across the region.

"It snowed in Virginia in June and again on the Fourth of July."