Precedentthe patterns history keeps Start the walk →
Entry 183 of 240Collapse

The Year Without a Summer

1815–1816 CE/Southeast Asia/Global
Today Sumbawa, Indonesia — and the whole worldSpan Tambora eruption · 1815

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 knowingTrapped 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.
◆ The mechanismEnvironmental & resource stress

An environmental shift (drought, cooling) strains food and water systems, amplifying every other tension at once.

Also: Demographic shock & recovery · Migration pressure

This is one stop on a walk through the whole human story, in order.

Precedent runs from 9500 BCE to the present in 240 short entries, a few a day. Under each one is the mechanism it's an instance of, and every earlier time you've walked past it. Free, no account needed.

Begin at 9500 BCE → Already walking? Open Precedent and you'll pick up where you left off.