ERUPTION OF MOUNT TAMBORA ~ INDONESIA

ERUPTION OF MOUNT TAMBORA ~ INDONESIA

The most destructive explosion on earth in the past 10,000 years, was the eruption of an obscure volcano in Indonesia ~ called Mount Tambora.
Tambora blasted 12 cubic miles of gases, dust and rock into the atmosphere, and onto the island of Sumbawa and the surrounding area.
Burning rivers poured down the mountain and burned grasslands and forests.
The ground shook, sending tsunamis racing across the Java Sea.
An estimated 10,000 of the island’s inhabitants died instantly.

Debris from the volcano, shrouded and chilled parts of the planet for many months, contributing to crop failure and famine in North America and epidemics in Europe.
Climate experts believe that Tambora was partly responsible for the unseasonable chill that afflicted much of the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, known as the “year without a summer.”

The eruption of Tambora was ten times more powerful than that of Krakatau, which is 900 miles away.
Dormant for thousands of years, the volcano began rumbling in early April of 1815.
Then, on 10th April the volcano sprung to life.
Three columns of fire shot from the mountain, and a plume of smoke and gas reached 25 miles into the atmosphere.
Fire-generated winds uprooted trees.

Pyroclastic flows, or incandescent ash, poured down the slopes at more than 100 miles an hour, destroying everything in their paths, and boiling and hissing into the sea 25 miles away.
Huge floating rafts of pumice trapped the ships in the harbour.

Throughout the region, ash rained down for weeks.
Houses hundreds of miles from the mountain, collapsed under the debris.
Sources of fresh water, became contaminated.
Crops and forests died.

All told, it was the deadliest eruption in history, killing an estimated 90,000 people on Sumbawa and neighbouring Lombok ~ most of them by starvation.
The major eruptions ended in mid-July, but Tambora’s ejecta would have profound, enduring effects.
Great quantities of sulfurous gas from the volcano, mixed with water vapor in the air.
Propelled by stratospheric winds, a haze of sulfuric acid aerosol, ash and dust circled the earth and blocked sunlight.

In China and Tibet, unseasonably cold weather killed trees, rice, and even water buffalo.
Floods ruined surviving crops.
In the northeastern United States, the weather in mid-May of 1816 turned “backward,” as locals put it, with summer frost striking New England and as far south as Virginia.
On 4th July, water froze in cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving inside churches, where the hearth fires warmed them.

In Europe and Great Britain, far more than the usual amount of rain fell in the summer of 1816.
It rained nonstop in Ireland for eight weeks.
The potato crop failed, and was followed by famine.
Typhus broke out in Ireland late in 1816, killing thousands ~ over the next couple of years, it spread through the British Isles.

The eruption of Mount Tambora.
Greg Harlin/Wood Ronsaville Harlin