Throughout history, supercurious things have happened, such as the year in which in many parts of the world borealis were seen, even in unusual places.
Today, we will talk about a particular year in which there was no summer in the northern hemisphere of the Earth, and the winter lasted at least a year and a half.Keep reading and find out about this interesting story that, according to some, even had another type of consequences, beyond the weather and famines.
The longest winter year: 1816
This long winter was the product of three factors.The first, the end of the Little Ice Age, a cold period that ran from the beginning of the fourteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century; the second, a historical drop in solar activity, known as “Dalton's Minimum,” and the third, and most important, was the eruption of Mount Tambora of 1815 .
This volcano forms the Sanggar Peninsula, north of Sumbawa Island, east of Java.After three years of progressive activity, on April 5, 1815 he made the first eruption, which lasted 33 hours and a column of ashes and smoke that reached 33 kilometers high.
However, no one left the site, despite the strange noises that came from Tambora, which came to be heard more than 1,000 kilometers away.Java, in the city of Yogyakarta, thought that they were canonazos, and troops were mobilized preventing some attack, until the fall of ashes convinced them that it was not a war.
It was not until April 10 that the biggest eruption in history came true: at 10 in the morning there was such an explosion that it formed a 44km column, and it was recorded that the sound of those terrible explosions were heard in Sumatra, more than 2,500 km away.A rain of pumice began to fall in blocks of up to 20 cm, and dense ashes.Some witnesses told that three columns of fire that danced above the volcano they joined together and then the mountain became a "liquid fire" throwing volcanic gases and a lava river in all directions, sweeping the town of Tambora and the Sanggar Peninsula; This volcanic mass covered the sea up to a distance of 40 km .
The immense cloud of ashes came to Java on 12, and was so dense that the sun's glare was not seen until the 10 in the morning.Everything ended on April 15, and on the 17th the rains ceased, which achieved a distance of 1,300 km.With the eruption, Mount Tambora sank and what was once one of the highest mountains in Malaysia , with 4,300 meters high, now it was reduced to 2,851 meters.
This terrifying eruption, much larger than that of Krakatoa in 1883, killed 11,000 people directly, but its influence was not there.
As a result of this terrible catastrophe there was what was agreed to be called "the year without summer", "the year of poverty", "the summer that never was" and "one thousand eight hundred and ice cream to death", which It happened in 1816.
A Severe food shortages were generated throughout the northern hemisphere.Crops from northern Europe and southern China were destroyed, as well as those from the north-east.
The consequences across the land were disastrous, as The volcano threw 1,500,000 tons of dust into the atmosphere, causing world temperatures to drop dramatically due to the reduction of sunlight. For two days in a row there was the darkest of the nights, and then a dry fog, reddish and orange, but the sunset of those years.The great impressionist forerunner, the English painter William Turner , so I leave it reflected in many of his paintings.
The famine and food shortages combined and caused the price of grains to increase suddenly, there were riots in many countries, and epidemics led to more than 200,000 souls.In 1816 the weather conditions were appalling in Europe and Asia, the rain and hail did not stop falling, and even in Italy and Hungary fell red and brown snow , thanks to the mixture of the snow with volcanic ash.
In China, cold and floods spoiled the crops, in India, the rains worsened the epidemic of the cholera that hit the country and extended it almost to Moscow, in Russia.Hunger weakened the population, and people died of starvation and cold.
Truly terrible.But some other things arose from the tragedy.It is attributed to the shortage of barley what prompted the German inventor Karl Drais to look for a means of transport that replaced the horse, and thus invented the dresina , a kind of ancestor of the bicycle, two wheels and handlebars but without pedals.
And in art we can find very interesting things.We know that romanticism , that cultural and artistic movement that put feelings above reason, arose to break with the neoclassicism of earlier times, with the rules that captured the free expression of the artist.
The romantics were idealists, and as good idealists, when faced with reality they fell into what was called " romantic discouragement ”, which made them despair and even commit suicide.The feelings of loneliness, adapting the landscape to the mood and rebellion are some of its characteristics, as well as extreme fantasy, mystery, subjectivity and sensitivity.
Well, this very long winter, which in the summer of 1816 with a group of friends, all writers: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and his then-lover Mary Shelley , and John Polidori, produced in the cultural mood an exaltation of the fa Ntasia and the stories of mysteries and ghosts.There are those who relate these last centuries of cold and darkness prevailing by the ashes of the Tambora with the romantic characteristics, attributing to the climate the cultural and even political changes unleashed in the 19th century.In Villa Diodati came out nothing less than Frankenstein of Mary Shelley, Byron's famous poem, "Darkness", and The Vampire by John Polidori, unavoidable works in literary history.
As a theory it is at least curious and fascinating.The lack of sunlight determined, according to this, an artistic movement where darkness, rain and fog would channel sensitivity and the perception of the world.The “year in which there was no summer” would then become the germ of a radical change (social, c Ultural, personal) that we still live today.What do you think?
And so that you do not close our page so quickly, stay reading the legend of the vampire of Alnwick Castle or how to kill vampires according to the classic formulas.
Images: diegoperez74 , NASA Johnson , Klaus Nahr , iQLia SLunce , Walter Lim
Comments
Post a Comment