The Year Without a Summer

1815–1816 CE — Southeast Asia, Global

Today: Sumbawa, Indonesia — and the whole world

Mount Tambora in Indonesia produced the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, killing perhaps 90,000 and throwing enough sulphur into the stratosphere to dim the sun worldwide. The following year had no summer: snow fell in New England in June, harvests failed across Europe and China, food prices doubled, and famine and typhus followed. Nobody at the time connected the weather to a mountain on the other side of the planet. It is the clearest demonstration that a single geological event can reach into every economy on earth within a year.

Worth knowing: Trapped indoors by the endless rain of that summer at a villa on Lake Geneva, a house party agreed to write ghost stories to pass the time. One of them was eighteen years old, and what she wrote was Frankenstein.

Pattern: Environmental & resource stress — An environmental shift (drought, cooling) strains food and water systems, amplifying every other tension at once.

Entry 183 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.