How Did One Volcano Change the Whole World?

On April 5, 1815, British officers on Java heard what sounded like cannon fire and sent boats to rescue a ship that didn't exist. It was Tambora, 800 miles away, starting the largest eruption in recorded history. The blast and the pyroclastic flows killed 10,000–12,000 people outright; starvation on Sumbawa and Lombok raised the toll to somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000. But the thing that changed the world wasn't the ash. It was 53–58 million tons of sulfur dioxide that reached the stratosphere, turned into an invisible acid haze and took about half a degree off the planet. A year later it snowed in New England in June, 130 of 153 summer days in Geneva were wet, Yunnan starved, bread riots broke out across Europe and typhus swept Ireland — and nobody alive knew the two things were connected. In this video: the cannon fire on Java; the "extinct" mountain on Sumbawa; three columns of fire and a tsunami without an earthquake; why the death toll is contested and where the 88,000 figure comes from; why ash can't cool a planet; sulfur, the stratosphere and sulfate aerosol; why a tropical volcano cools both hemispheres; 1816, the year without a summer; famine, riots, typhus and the exodus from New England; the Little Ice Age, the Dalton Minimum and the mystery eruption of 1808–1809 in the ice cores; Frankenstein, the bicycle, cholera and Turner's sunsets — what holds up and what doesn't; Samalas, the VEI scale and the odds of the next one. 0:00 The cannon fire nobody could find 0:45 The mountain everyone thought was extinct 1:10 April 10, 1815: three columns of fire 1:41 Pyroclastic flows and a tsunami 2:21 How many people died 3:23 The ash myth 3:47 53 million tons of sulfur 4:37 Why a tropical volcano cools the whole planet 5:05 1816: the year without a summer 6:01 Famine in Yunnan, riots in Europe 6:29 Typhus and the year of the beggar 7:28 Tambora didn't do it alone 8:10 The mystery eruption hidden in the ice 9:10 Frankenstein and the rainy summer 9:47 Did a volcano invent the bicycle? 10:23 Cholera and Turner's red sunsets 11:28 The VEI scale and the odds this century 12:27 How one volcano changed the world Music: "Echoes of Time", "Lightless Dawn", "Deliberate Thought", "Atlantean Twilight", "Dark Times", "Immersed", "Interloper" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... #Tambora #YearWithoutASummer #Volcano #History #1816