Doomed to Fail - Ep 46: Volcanoes Pt 3 - The Silent Summer: Tambora's Echo in Time

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Welcome to the third part of our series on volcanoes. In 1815, Mt. Tambora, located in Indonesia, erupted, causing a significant drop in global temperatures. This event had far-reaching consequences that affected people all over the world. Join us as we delve into the fascinating stories of Mary Shelley, Thomas Jefferson, John Smith, and others who lived through the consequences of this event, known as The Year Without a Summer.Photos via Midjourney AI The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed HistoryInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we are back. Welcome to Dune to Fail, the podcast. We cover a historic and true crime story that is due to fail. We just did a true crime slash sort of history podcast. And now we're doing the history only one with Taylor, who if I had to guess, given that she chose Coca-Cimes. on water is going to cover a volcano today. I am going to cover a volcano today. Good guess. It was an Indonesian thing. It's a lot of them are in Indonesia.

So this one's from Indonesia. Is that called the Ring of Fire? No, I think that we, yes, yes, yes, this is. Yes, the Ring of Fire is like Indonesia and like kind of up by like Hawaii and stuff. Yes, it is called the Ring of Fire, which is also an Oxanaut's episode. So I feel like I've learned a lot. Last week you talked about how I learned about snow days from the Octanauts. And I also learned about volcanoes and then bring a fire from rocks and knots.

So definitely recommend. Yes, as far as you're correct. Oh, wait, do you want to do an intro? Yeah, I did. This is doomed to fail. Is that? Did you do that? Yeah, you did that for both.

Oh, you did? OK. So I am, this is going to be shorter than usual for me, because I could not finish reading the book I was reading. I have like an hour left. We are going to go back into volcanoes. And this is going to be pretty quick. I wasn't able to finish the book I was reading,

but the book I was reading is kind of about this global impact. So I have some fun stories that are affected by the fact that the weather across the whole entire globe was affected during this one. So today it's Volcanoes Part 3, the eruption of Mount Tambora, and the year without a summer in 1816. Sweet. So because there was no summer, there was also no food. It was like a very, very bad year for the entire planet,

all affected by this eruption in 1815 in Indonesia. Mount Tambora is a strata volcano, which means if you cut it up, it looks like a cake. It's like layers of land just has been like growing for, you know, for millions of years. It's on the island of Sambawa in Indonesia. It was part of the Dutch East Indies at that point. So it's like where the Dutch were like doing their slave trade and all that.

The 1815 eruption was the most. most powerful volcanic eruption in human history. So in recorded history, obviously, like the other ones we're talking about, like, what Toba was more, but this was the biggest one that we've ever, like, been around for and have written down. It had a VEI, which is a volcanic exclusivity index of seven. So I think we talked about that a little bit that, like, it's like the Richter scale where every one is times 10, you know?

So just to look at, like, it's way worse. So a little table, like when a volcano erupts at a zero, it's a, it's technically classified as a Hawaiian eruption. So that's when like you see videos of like in Hawaii where it's a little bit of smoke, but it's like lava very, very slowly. Right. You know, like people don't really die because of lava because it can burn down houses for sure, but it doesn't like rush at you. Right. It just is kind of slow. Yeah.

And then there's a strombolian, a vulcanian, a bunch of them. And then a five on the volcanic explosivity index scale is a plenian. And plenian is named after. Plenty of the elder. Plenty of the younger. And it's plenty of, I think it's plenty of the younger because he had the first-hand account of Mount Vesuvius. So a number of five is Mount Vesuvius. And then a number six is some other ones that we'll talk about in the future.

So Crackatoa and Mount St. Helens, I think, was a six. I'm looking at, no, no, no. On the Hells was not a six. That would have been way bigger. Crackatoa was a six. And then obviously gets worse and worse. An ultraplenian mega colossal end of the world volcano is what Tobo was. That's an eight.

So Toba's an eight A six is like Krakatoa So obviously still like huge We've heard about it Vesuvius is a five And then The An ultraplinian super colossal is a seven

And that's what Tembora was So which means that like The ash plume Can be about 20 kilometers in the air And it It makes a substantial change on the atmosphere in the whole world. It's a big, it was a big one.

It was a big one. So there are 11 strata volcanoes in California. I was looking up. There's not in Texas. I was like how many volcanoes are here. There's a lot in like the, obviously in like Washington State and like Oregon area. They have a lot of them as well. So the main eruption of Mount Tambora was on April 10th, 1815.

It continued to put ash. into the air for months and it was like the lava was like low and slow but it was the ash that is is a problem the explosion was heard up to 1600 miles away and ash fell at least 800 miles away so just like layers and layers of ash the explosion this is this is the one because the next one I think the next one we'll do is crackatoa and crackatoa was later in the 1800s when that one erupted they had telegraphs. and they were able to tell people what was going on like over the airwaves but in 1815 they did not so kind of fun kind of awful on people on all these islands around went outside because they thought

they were being attacked so like native tribes Dutch people everyone like went to the beaches because they were sure that someone was shooting a cannon onto their shore like that's the sound that they heard yeah these things these natural disasters are so confusing because they're so they don't happen frequently enough for your body and brain to register what the hell is going on. Like I'm like the first first one I had in LA. It was like somebody drove into the house. So there's no other explanation. Your brain can't even process it. Exactly. It's so confusing. So people thought they were being attacked. And they didn't know it was happening because you just didn't know. And then like the explosions continued for

days. And then the ash started to, um, started to fall kind of all over. There was a village of Tambora that had like a native population that was destroyed by the pyroclastic flow. They've done a little bit of excavating there. They found, like, a house and a couple of bodies. But there are people who died, you know, kind of immediately because of that. There were small tsunamis that happened along all the islands nearby. And people for months, like the Dutch who were doing their trading and their ships like around these islands saw, like, huge, like, iceberg-sized piles of ash, you know, like in the ocean. There's just, like, huge ash piles everywhere.

They heard the explosions until July. It just kind of kept going. It's estimated that there were 11,000 deaths from the volcano itself, and then 49,000 from post-erruption famine, but that number actually also goes up to 121,000 people dying from famine all over the world because of this. Another kind of table that I have, like Mount Vesuvius killed about 2,000 people. because not a lot of people were there. People had already started to leave. And it didn't have that, like, climate effect that Tambora did.

So the tambora eruption definitely is anywhere from 71,000 people to 121,000 people died from the effects of it. So one of the first things that happened. So it happened in April 19, or 1815, but the year that summer is 1816 because it took a while for like the actual full. environmental impact to happen. But in 1815, all over Europe, the snow started falling and it was yellow and it was like brick red in the Alps. Isn't that crazy? Why? Because of the ash and like the stuff from the volcano ash and particles that were still up in the atmosphere.

They became, they like joined them with the clouds, became the snow. And so it snowed these like crazy yellow and red colors in Europe. weird um the and you don't know why also you know you don't have any concept that there was this volcano exploded in indonesia you just know that all of a sudden um you know the air is crazy and things are like the snow's weird and there's no it's just continuous rain so over a year later 1816 is a year without a summer um and it's near without a summer in europe and north america and this is kind of before we started studying the weather which is crazy because it's not too long ago it's like 200 years ago but no one studied the weather before then because it's hard

to predict the weather even now you know like shit happens that you don't expect so you know there could be you know we don't we can't 100% with certainty predict the weather and people just thought that God controlled it so they were like yeah if God wants it to be sunny it'll be sunny and you know we can pray for rain by research it like they didn't think that there was anything more to it than that like god controls the weather so there's no reason to study it um and so there were there wasn't anything about it so our founding fathers um actually of course it was like because they did a whole bunch of um stuff in like many many many many fields but like benjamin franklin actually was the first person to like write down that he thought a volcano could affect weather

across the world um so he was like this is something that could happen but he you know didn't have any proof that it could happen and then thomas jefferson he wrote down the um the weather every day and no one else did so we i mean if they did we don't have it so we have a record of the weather in 1816 and really tamas jefferson's whole adult life um that's invaluable because we don't have weather records from that far back you know i've had people made fun of him was like what a nerd he's writing down the weather and now it's like invaluable information exactly i don't think anyone called t j a nerd but yes um no trying to adam choppy did So in 1816, T.J. and John Adams are both still alive. They don't die until 1826. So they're both like, they're not president anymore. James Lumber was president, but they're like, you know, thinking about it and writing about the weather. Because that's the kind of shit they wrote to each other about. They hated each other, but they were still in contact. And did you know that they both died on July 4th, 1826? Like two hours apart. Yeah. So fun. So, um,

what else not a lot of people did that one thing that they would do that is so funny and they say this several several times in the book that i read oh it just called mount tempora in the year without a summer i'll put it in um in the notes but um they talk a lot about in the book you know the effects that were happening on the whole world and i'll talk about some of the things culturally that happened but um one thing that they would do often is just ask the oldest person that they know do you remember anything like this before like because they didn't have any records. So they'd be like, oh, well, my grandpa is 70. Let's ask him, has it ever seen snow in June? And he'd be like, never. And you'd be like, this is crazy. You know, like, that's the only way they were doing is. Do you remember rain this much?

Do you remember this? Like, just ask the oldest person they know to see what they remember. Because I think was really written down. So what was happening in 1816 is the particles from the volcanic ash from Tambora were up in the atmosphere. And they were reflecting the sun and causing the temperature. to drop. So if the eruption had been less bad but gone higher, it could have been worse on the weather

because the particles would be smaller, but then they'd have more surface area. Does that kind of make sense? So because the eruption was so huge, the particles were bigger, so they had a little bit less surface area because they combined some, yeah. So it's the reflection

that created it's them reflecting the sun back to the sun that made it so cold down on earth. people didn't know what was happening so they thought that it was because of sunspots and I looked up sunspots and oh my god looking at close up pictures of the sun

is fucking terrifying. It's crazy It's a giant fall fire This like inferno that we have that gives a light, it's so scary so I was looking at sun spots and like we don't even 100% know what they are now we think it has to do with the magnetic fields in the sun which also is what happened in the movie 2012

right? I was I was on the way I was in an Uber yesterday, and I looked over and it was like, I kind of, the car I was in was like super tinted, so I'd kind of look at the sun. And I was like, I was like, I was thinking about Oppenheimer and I was like, one of these things just opened up in the middle of a city. Like, it's crazy to think about. Yeah. Yeah. So scary. It's like a fireball. It's like, it's, it's a nuclear reaction that just never ends. Uh-huh. Sorry, I'm like, yeah. No, totally. No, it's scary. And the whole, I don't understand what sunspots are, magnetic fields, all of that. But that's what they thought it was. It's not, it wasn't that.

It was a volcano. But they could see sunspots during 1816. They thought that that was part of it. They also thought maybe it was the trade wins. They really didn't know. But in, in Europe, during 1816, here's what happens this summer. People leave England in droves because England is soaking wet. It rains constantly.

There are no days without rain. in England over that summer. The harvest is totally destroyed. Corn doesn't grow, wheat doesn't grow. People have to decide, do we feed our animals? Do we feed ourselves? You know, how do we survive during this time? The price of meat actually went down because people were selling their animals quickly because they couldn't afford to feed them anymore. So they would like sell their cows rather than have them like continue to eat. There were riots all over the big major cities. Some rioters carried flags reading bread or blood because they were starving. People were starving all over. The food riots of 1816 and 1817 were the highest levels of violence since the French

Revolution in France. It's the worst famine of 19th century Europe. It's like a couple of years before the great potato famine of Ireland, but it definitely decimates the potato crops in Ireland as well. Other things in Europe that are going on, as we also know, Mary Shelley, is this is when she writes Frankenstein and because they were stuck inside in Geneva they read constantly. They had an absolute miserable time and they were they were just like writing scary stories because they were absolutely

miserable. Napoleon is still alive which is fun he's been to Elba and been back and now he's on his second exile. I don't know why they don't just kill him but he's still around. So France is also dealing yeah me too I can't wait. So I also heard my friend karen told me there's a movie about napoleon that's old it's like seven hours long that's great don't have patience for that somebody watched um so Napoleon is still around kind of talking to people talking about the weather talking about god talking about being an emperor um in england Jane Austen writes

persuasion so a lot of good like art came out of this because people were stuck inside you know and had to go back to reading and writing and painting and such. The German inventor Carl Dreyas, he is trying to find new ways to get around without horses because people don't have any food to feed their horses. So he invents the Velocopede. Anyway, it's the first bike. He invents the first bicycle during this time because he wants to get people to be able to transport themselves without needing animals.

It's pretty cool. Because of it. Yeah. So there were in North America, it snowed all summer. In Massachusetts, in like Boston, it's snowed in June in summer. And, like, that's never happened before. Crops failed all over the northeast. So these towns and people who were like living in towns and had businesses,

their businesses closed or crops failed, people moved out of towns. there were also like it's also a huge um you know obviously like religious thing happening people think you know that god did it so another thing that happened is a man who had a business in a town in vermont that had ended up being like shut down because of the economy and because all crops were failing he moved to a town in new york where people were very very very religious and he started to talk to them about religion and that was john smith so that's what he started the Mormon church and he had moved there and people were like really riled up about God because of this time because the weather was so bad it's like all connected history's crazy

yeah it's all connected it's crazy um that's like the context it's super fun so um yeah that is honestly all that I have I know this is not my longest one but um you know it was a volcano in Indonesia and you didn't know what was happening yet because you didn't you didn't have the communication yet but you can see things in the sky like the sky turned orange and they do a little bit of like a backdating of like art and people who painted landscapes and like the landscapes that they show during this time much more orange much more yellow than they'd ever been before and this is when people start to really like start thinking about the weather and like writing down pieces of the weather and that will continue just to get better and better but before then like you knew basically you know this is when we harvest this is this and this but you didn't have any idea that like a hurricane could come or a tornado or any of these like big weather events you just didn't know yet which I think is really interesting and scary to be like oh here's something new I've never seen before or I'm in the alps it's snowing the snow is red I'd be like the devil is here yeah I don't know what else you could possibly think if it starts snowing like bright red you'd be like well this is it's been great but now it snows like blood and I'm going to leave like I don't know it reminded me of um you and Juan's pack with each other where you're like, one, if I ever tell you that it's raining teeth in the backyard, you just have to me. And like, that's what this was. 100%. Yeah. If I'm like, babe, it's, it rained teeth all day. He'll be like, great,

let's move. I'm like, great. Thank you for believing me and understanding that I saw teeth fall from the sky. And that, yeah. So, yeah, it's an interesting, like, creative year. And when the next one we talk about, we'll talk about Krakatoa, that was in 1883. and that's when the world knew a little bit more about it. That's when Munch paints the scream. Like, that's when we start seeing a little bit more in art around the world. But Tambora is, I think, the most recent, huge one that had, like, those global effects that people heard for, like, you know, thousands of miles and all of that. Like, Mount St. Helens is nothing compared to this.

You know, this one is a really, really huge one. Yeah. Is this? Montson-Hollins is this the context podcast. We're doing historical context on things. Shit, I think that's all we've been doing. I think every story is context. So, yes.

It is interesting. We didn't discuss our topics, and we kind of both settled. Well, it was Dan Carlin's fault. It's all Dan Carlin's fault. Another, oh, another thing. So the last, this is number three, a volcano is the last volcano that I will do is the future and what we think might happen if Yellowstone actually does erupt, but if Yellowstone erupts, it will be an eight similar to Mount Toba that destroyed a lot of humanity.

I mean, America will be gone, we'll die. It will happen, right? It's just a matter of like when it happens. Yes. Because there is a volcano there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The Yellowstone super volcano. I mean, it'll happen someday. Hopefully, we'll be long gone. Or maybe we'll be here. Maybe it'll be fun. We don't have to work anymore. Yeah, it'll be like Woody Harrelson. Yes, we'll be like Woody Harrell's in 2012.

That's exactly what it will be like. Just watch it. Just watch it coming. Or did you mean Woody Hall, Rudy Harrelson, just like today? No, 2012. No, no, 2012. Got it. Got it, got, got, got, got.

Yeah. Yeah, crazy. It's cool also that when people are stuck inside, they create some cool art. at least like the richer people do you know the poor people are just trying to survive the rich people are creating art which is you know a whole thing that um you know when rich people are unemployed they get to create art or when they get to choose what they do they create art i get it i get it i get it but um but yeah that's it that's my that's my quick story on on tambora

more volcanoes in the future um but yeah more volcanoes more context um more context it's all connected It's all connected. I highly recommend, please do. Go listen to Dan Carlin as well. And support all of things. Write to us, follow us. Tell us what you think. That's what you think. Give us ideas. And if you see walking around a coffee shop with a bunch of stickers, just take one. Take one. Get a sticker. Send us an email. DigitalPod at gmail.com. I'll literally just send you a sticker. I want more people to have one. Look, I have one on my phone. And then I thought, is it bad that I'll I'll be taking pictures at a wedding from my phone with this doomed to fail sticker on it. That is so fun. That is so fun. I feel smidge bad.

I love it. I love it. It's awesome. It is what it is. Yes. I'm going to go check my mailbox. Thanks, Taylor. We'll have fun.

Have fun there. Have fun in New York. Have fun of the wedding. And have a safe trip back home. And I'm going to go see if I have stickers. Woo. Sweet. I'm going to go ahead.

Thanks, everyone. Okay. Thank you.