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This is Daniel Radcliffe—he’s most famous for starring as the character “Harry Potter”
in some movie series whose name I forget, and as the character of “boyfriend” in
the dreams of tweenagers throughout the 2000s, and this is Daniel Radcliffe with weird long
hair that makes him look like if Harry Potter’s mom had ended up with Snape.
Now some might blame a production designer for Harry Potter and the Hairdo Slaughter,
but not me, because I know the real culprit: the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora
in the early 19th century.
Confused?
Good.
To understand how this led to this, we have to talk about 1816: the year without a summer.
In April of 1815, Mount Tambora said to no one in particular, “would it be cool with
you guys I did a big eruption and messed up the whole world for little bit?”
Nobody answered, as Moana hadn’t yet taught us how to speak to volcanoes, so Mount Tambora
took it as a yes, and spewed out enough ash and pumice to cover an area 100 miles or 160
kilometers in each direction with 12 feet or 3.5 meters of debris; an amount scientists
refer to as “a buttload.”
This remains the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history—for context, it
was 100 times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, and approximately
one point eight bazillion times more powerful that the 2003 eruption of your 2nd grade science
fair project.
Now, despite what the Mythbusters, the Avengers, and US foreign policy may have taught you,
doing explosions usually tends to have consequences, and the eruption of Mount Tambora was no different.
So, a normal volcanic eruption can spew dust into the air, cooling the area down for a
few days, as the dust particles block the sunlight.
Mount Tambora did do that, but it also did much more: the eruption was so massive that
it also spewed a ton of sulfur dioxide up into the stratosphere, where it reacted with
water vapor to create sulfate aerosols, which kind of acted like the opposite of greenhouse
gases, reflecting sunlight back into space and cooling down average land temperatures
worldwide by somewhere between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius—which may not sound like a lot,
but remember that so far global warming has only heated the earth about 1.2 degrees Celsius,
and yet the American West already looks like it was invaded by the Fire Nation.
Although the eruption happened in April of 1815, the worst effects came in 1816, leading
historians to dub it “The Year Without A Summer,” which may sound like a John Green
teen romance tragi-comedy, but was actually something even more annoying: a period of
widespread cold, food shortages, and death.
Cold Miser’s reign of terror was perhaps most stark in the American Northeast.
In New York, temperatures went below freezing nearly every day in May; in June, much of
the region saw 20 inches of snow; in July and August, lake and river ice was seen as
far south as Northwestern Pennsylvania; even Virginia—which, as its 241 confederate monuments
will remind you, is firmly in the American south—reported having frost as late as August
21st.
Now, as any New Englander will obnoxiously brag, they’re used to the cold, and while
a cold summer may be annoying, it won’t kill them.
But it turns out crops feel differently, and when faced with the cold weather, most oats,
grains, and corn in New England made the frankly selfish choice to die, leading to hunger and
a massive price increase: oats alone went from 12 cents a bushel in 1815 to 92 cents
a bushel in 1816, a price hike that would make even a pharma CEO balk.
While things in New England, New York, and New Jersey were bad, things were decidedly
not awesome in Regular England, Regular York, Regular Jersey, or the rest of Western Europe.
A summer of low temperatures and heavy rains exacerbated what had already been a bad few
years of crop yield, leading to the worst famine of the 19th century in mainland Europe,
which caused Europeans to get decidedly hangry, and do looting, arson, and riots in the highest
levels of European violence since the French Revolution.
What about Asia, you ask?
Well, things there were actually pretty good, if by pretty good you mean extremely bad.
China saw a massive famine, tropical Taiwan got summer snow, and the monsoon season was
disrupted, leading to huge floods in the Yangtze Valley, and heavy rains in India that contributed
to an enormous cholera outbreak.
Now, of course, the death and destruction caused by the Year Without a Summer is tragic—but
let’s be honest, it’s hardly that surprising; as I learned on the AP World History exam,
if you assume that the result of any major event in world history was a “a lot of people
died,” you’re almost always right.
But like the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts’ decision to reject the application of a young
Austrian boy, the Year Without a Summer had a number of unexpected consequences.
Many believe that the miserable summer in New England led many Americans to venture
west to more fertile land, directly contributing to the settling of the American Midwest, and
indirectly contributing to the use of the phrase “dontcha know.”
Military experts claim that the cold, rainy weather in 1815 directly contributed to Napoleon’s
loss at Waterloo, and thus indirectly, the end credits scene of the 2008 film Mamma Mia!
Because the oat shortages made it harder to have horses to ride around, a German inventor
named Karl Drais was inspired to develop a new form of transportation that led to the
bicycle, and thus indirectly led to everyone loving and then hating and then forgetting
about Lance Armstrong and those little yellow wristbands.
And finally, the cold, rainy, miserable summer weather led a group of British romantic authors
to vacation indoors in a mansion near Lake Geneva, where as part of a competition to
write the scariest story, Mary Shelley produced a novel called Frankenstein—a book that
in 2015, would be turned into an adaptation called Victor Frankenstein, starring Daniel
Radcliffe, for which he was forced to get a haircut that made him look like Fran Leibowitz
after a makeover.
And that, my friends, is what we call a payoff.
Somebody should have stopped Daniel Radcliffe from getting that hairdo—and probably the
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