1816: The Year Without a Summer
by Long before the phrase “nuclear winter” was coined, the northern hemisphere experienced one.
Snowfalls continued in this region through July and August, with a crop-killing frost occurring during each month. Farmers survived on deer meat and unripe potatoes. The Iberian Peninsula in Europe suffered the same fate. Baron Malda of Barcelona noted in his diary that there was a great snowfall in the center of Spain on July 16, 1816. Food riots broke out in several European countries that summer.
The Winter of 1816-17
Winter hit with a vengeance beginning September 27. Snows began during early October and stayed on the ground until April, 1817. During that period much of the New Englander’s livestock perished, either because there was nothing to feed them with, or because they were slaughtered for food. Tens of thousands of people also perished in what became the worst famine of the 19th Century.
Aftermath
It is reported that Benjamin Franklin suspected a connection between volcanic explosions and adverse weather, but those New England farmers didn’t know what hit them or whether and when it would recur. Thus commenced a significant migration to the south and Midwest.
Mary Shelley and her husband Percy spent the summer of 1816 at the vacation home of Lord Byron on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The foul weather kept this group indoors most of the time, so Lord Byron suggested that his guests write ghost stories. Byron wrote a largely forgotten poem called “Darkness.” Mary Shelley penned the novel “Frankenstein.” It was an appropriately maudlin tale for a summer that happened only on the calendar.
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