Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (edição 2015)

A thoughtful look at the volcano eruption that lead to the "year without a summer". the author takes the reader around the world to chart the impact of Tamora's eruption on weather and food production. ( )

This is the one you never heard of, and should have. Set close to our club's reading "The Invention of Nature: .. Humboldt ..", Wulf, this book brings us back to the early 19th Century. These two show, in practical terms, the activity which brought us "The Age of Wonder". How science moved out of "natural philosophy", and allows us to employ scientists as professionals, no longer amateurs. I give it half a point more than the Humboldt on the "one you never heard of scale". And for connecting "the year with no summer" to it's place in history and geography. ( )

A brilliant idea for a book. D'Arcy Wood examines the world-wide impact of the eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815. In doing so, it provides lessons on how we are currently looking at global climate changes and how catastrophic such changes could be. This book is strongly recommended. ( )

Tambora
Author: Gillen D’arcy Wood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published In: Princeton, NY, USA
Date: 2014
Pgs: 293

REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Summary:
In 1815, a mountain in Indonesia exploded. Mount Tambora’s eruption threw a massive sulfur cloud into the atmosphere that changed the climate and weather for years around the world bringing about storms, droughts, floods, famine, disease, and civil unrest. This is the story of Tambora’s catastrophic aftermath. The Year Without a Summer was Tambora’s fault; ruined crops in Europe and America, millions displaced, chaos, economic depression, Ireland’s Great Famine, a cholera epidemic, and the expansion of the Chinese opium trade.

Genre:
Apocalypse
Disaster
End of the World
History
Science
Society

Why this book:
I read the cover because of the volcano and knowing a bit of the story. I picked it up because of all the stuff that it was mentioned as impacting from the Irish Potato Famine to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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The Feel:
It’s bleak as the disaster unfolds around the world and the focus of the book shifts to follow the impacts.

Favorite Scene:
The author talks of standing on the ridge of Tambora’s 6-kilometer caldera imagining a mountain that would reach from the sulfurous green lake in the crater’s basin to a mile above his head.

The description of the King and his retinue’s escape from the rampant volcanism loosed on his island by Tambora and their trek through soot choked and dark as night days to the less affected parts of the island are well done.

Pacing:
The pace seems to flow like fast moving magma racing downhill. I look up and realize that I’ve blown through another ten pages. Boom.

Hmm Moments:
The first scientist to make the connection between volcanoes and climate...Ben Franklin. He made the connection and sent an admittedly thin treatise on the subject to a local Philosophical Society that had awarded him honorary membership while he was in Paris. Weather had blasted Europe that with unseasonable winter for a year. The weather also made the North Atlantic especially icy that year. This delayed the ratification of the treaty ending the American Revolution. Franklin, rightly it turns out, laid the blame on the odd weather at the feet of an Icelandic volcano called Laki tha had erupted in June 1783 and was still impacting weather into the next year. This was two decades prior to Tambora. Tambora’s eruption caused further ranging effects because of both its size and its location. Being in the tropics, the sulfurous clouds from Tambora could sweep into both Hemispheres and throughout the Tropics around the world rather than being confined by jetstreams as Laki’s eruption was to Europe and the North Atlantic. The proof of Franklin’s speculations wouldn’t come until the Cold War when scientists began measuring the effects of nuclear fallout and realized that volcanic aerosols could have similar weather/climate effects.

Tambora’s effects on harvests in Russia and American West weren’t as severe. During the three years of this effect, farmers in these regions were able to command huge prices. I wonder what effect a monetary tsunami of this kind could be said to have had on the economies of these two future world powers.

A thread can be followed from the Tambora climatic famine events through the Yunnan province of China with the Hmong people who migrated down the Mekong into Southest Asia taking their opium producing skills grown in the famine rich Tambora era with them. These same Hmong and their opium producing skills were present in the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. Tambora helped opium production in a weary world following years of famine and, then, later on, heroin explode onto the world markets through the 1950s and in the Vietnam War era.

Tambora, Britain, Canada, Greenland, the quest for the Northwest Passage, and John Barrow is a real son of a bitch. He’s an ass who saw his chance to make a name for himself at the expense of the two men who actually reported the lanes free of sea ice near Greenland. And he bullied, belittled, and defamed both Scoresby and O’Reilly from the bully pulpit afforded him by the Royal Navy and society when both of them were eyewitnesses to what was going on while he had never been to the Arctic. He’s an ass. And he and his “scientific” knowledge are one of the bellcows that climate change deniers hang their hats on today...imagine that.

Tambora is described as being roughly 12 times the power of Pinatubo which erupted in 1992. With the impacts of Pinatubo on life and environment, I find that unimaginable.

Tambora’s climate impact on winter and summer drove immigrants from Europe to America and in America drove settlers westward. Tambora gave birth to modern Western history as we know it.

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Last Page Sound:
Wow!

Author Assessment:
I would read more history texts by Gillen Wood.

Editorial Assessment:
Well done.

Knee Jerk Reaction:
real genre classic

Disposition of Book:
Irving Public Library

Would recommend to:
genre fans ( )

Tambora takes what is commonly known about the effects of the 1815 Tambora eruption, such as the Year without a Summer or its influence on the writing of Frankenstein, and expands it to a global scale. The large equatorial eruption dumped huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere causing a year-long winter in Europe and Eastern North America as well as monsoon failure in Asia. The resulting famines displaced thousands and killed millions. But until now the focus has been on the European and American experiences. I had no idea that it was during this period that cholera evolved to become capable of pandemics or that the drought in China led to the introduction of opium poppy cultivation in Yunnan and later in Southeast Asia. It can also be shown to have led to Britain's many failed Polar expeditions of the mid-nineteenth century.

A masterful blending of history and science with direct repercussions for today (think climate change). I found it readable, and would recommend it for anyone with an interest in volcanoes, climate, or world history. ( )