Source: scienceVolcanic Sunsets and Years without Summer
On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora exploded. Tambora is a stratovolcano in Indonesia, and has been overshadowed in the popular imagination by Krakatoa, another Indonesian volcano that erupted in 1883. But Tambora was larger. It was, in fact, the largest eruption in recorded history, topping 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. The casualties are estimated to be around 75,000-90,000, more than any other known eruption. Most interesting from a scientific perspective is the profound effect such eruptions have on the global climate.
1816 was called “the year without a summer” in the northern hemisphere, especially in Europe and North America. Now, the years of 1790-1830 saw a minimum of solar activity, which no doubt contributed to the unusually cold summer. But the reason this year was outstanding even for a cold period was almost certainly Tambora. Put simply, dust and volcanic ashes blocked the sun. Some of the effects, from an old article at The Smithsonian:
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. “In June … another snowfall came and folk went sleighing,” Pharaoh Chesney, of Virginia, would later recall. “On July 4, water froze in cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving inside churches where hearth fires warmed things a mite.” Thomas Jefferson, having retired to Monticello after completing his second term as President, had such a poor corn crop that year that he applied for a $1,000 loan. (…)
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. Famine ensued. The widespread failure of corn and wheat crops in Europe and Great Britain led to what historian John D. Post has called “the last great subsistence crisis in the western world.” After hunger came disease. Typhus broke out in Ireland late in 1816, killing thousands, and over the next couple of years spread through the British Isles.
In Portugal and Spain, droughts and unseasonally low temperatures caused problems.
The effects could be seen not only in crops and thermometers, but also in art. A survey of paintings by notable artists done before or in the years immediately following major volcanic eruptions shows that sunsets, as seen by artists, were significantly redder immediately following eruptions. The findings correlate well with historic estimates of the Dust Veil Index, a measure of how much dust and aerosols a particular volcano released, compared to background conditions.
Why would volcanic dust in the atmosphere make sunsets redder? The reason the sky is blue at midday and red at dusk and dawn is Rayleigh scattering. Molecules and tiny particles in the atmosphere scatter incoming sunlight. Shorter wavelengths like blue light are scattered more strongly, resulting in a blue sky. However, when the sun is low in the sky, the angle means sunlight must pass through a much larger volume of atmosphere before it reaches us. This causes the bluer wavelengths to be scattered away, leaving reddish light, giving us red sunsets. A denser atmosphere due to a volcanic eruption would exacerbate this effect.
Above are The Lake, Petworth (circa 1827-28) and Sunset (circa 1833), both painted by J. M. W. Turner. The first painting was done before the 1831 eruption of Babuyan Claro, a volcano located in the Phillipines, while the second, redder one was most likely done less than two years after said eruption. One of the most famous red sunsets in art, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, is also speculated to have been inspired by atmospheric conditions after a major eruption, Krakatoa in 1883.
![The left hand group of surviving figures from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, exhibited as part of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.
[Below is a little history lesson, followed by some personal thoughts.]
I just read of the Elgin Marbles in a textbook from which I’m studying for class. The author, T.H. Leahey, writes:
…the Elgin Marbles [are] named after Lord Elgin, a British Hellenophile who brought them back to England for preservation. The Elgin Marbles are large flat slabs of carved stone that were part of the decorative frieze around the top of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. In the Museum, they are rightly given a large room of their own, mounted high around the walls to give the viewer some sense of the original experience of seeing them. They are indeed marvelous works of art, but I was disappointed by how little about the marbles was told by the Museum’s labels. They discussed the purely formal, aesthetic properties of the Marbles, pointing out, for example, how the figures on one echoed the forms on another across the room. They did not reveal what the figures and forms meant, what they people, gods, and animals were doing. At first, I thought this formal approach simply reflected the fact that archeology developed in Europe as a branch of art history and therefore stressed aesthetic appreciation, whereas archeology developed in America as a branch of anthropology and stressed cultural interpretation…
Subsequently, however, I learned the the story was less simple: no one really knows what the Elgin Marbles mean. Traditionally, they are thought to show the Panathenaic Procession. Once a year, the leaders and citizens of Athens staged a grand parade to the Parthenon to honor their city’s special god, Athena. However, detailed interpretation remains lacking, and some scholars think the marbles commemorate a legendary sacrifice by a mother of her two daughters to gain an Athenian military victory. Had she had sons, they would have died in battle, so she gave her daughters. That the Marbles are something of a mystery is especially surprising because the Parthenon is not especially old. The Parthenon whose ruins we see today was erected in the heyday of the “glory that was Greece” era, during the leadership of Pericles (495-429 B.C.)… as a replacement for structures destroyed by Persian invaders. The Greeks were inventing philosophy, science, and history, yet we have no discussions of the meaning of the Parthenon frieze. People rarely write down what they take for granted… Often, our grip on the past will be loose, for much quotidian detail is gone forever.
I feel it is certainly worth it to include that mini history lesson, but it is truly the last 2 sentences from the above passage that resonated with me. Is the same not true for our own personal histories? Our lives? We remember the memorable, the battles, the disasters, the greatest of celebrations and spectacles, but are bound to lose the mundane quotidian detail that is the brick and mortar of life itself? Must the answers to the whys and hows surrounding those saliencies slip away as mundane details are wont to do? Must all we leave behind be big, empty questions?
When I’m reflecting on my young life in old age, I don’t want to lose the detail to the blurring of time. I love this life and I want to keep it forever. A greedy memory hoarder is what I am!
I need to take pictures of everything.I need to write everything down.
I don’t want my future-past to be like the Elgin Marbles, with memory filling in the gaps between what was once one memory, one whole, now fragmented into superficial pieces, artifacts as broken evidence of a dissolved intangible, as the last remaining proof that it existed at all—with the “it” to be determined by imagination and reasoning over knowing. I need to get to work on a death bed time capsule.
NEW PLAN: Once every 3-5 years, I will make a time capsule. When I’m dying, or feel that the time is right, I will open them all up in one beautiful ritualistic evening of nostalgia and reflection. I will start on the first of these this week! What a shame should I die suddenly. I feel a deepened commitment to longevity!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m00nz4R2id1qc5ofpo1_1280.jpg)
