Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use please go to BBC.co.uk.

UK.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello in April 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora erupted on the island of

Sambaoai in what we now call Indonesia. It was one of the largest eruptions

in the last 80,000 years killing more people than any other volcano and releasing millions

of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The effect on the immediate area was clear

and devastating. What was less well known until now is the effect Tambora had on global

weather and arguably global events. The following year, 1816, became known as The Year

Without a Summer across Europe and Eastern America.

June and July Storms and Frost inspired creative imaginations, but devastated crops

and brought more hunger to a Europe short of food and work as its struggled to recover from the Napoleonic Wars.

With me to discuss Tambour and the year without summer are Clive Oppenheimer, Professor of

Volcanology at the University of Cambridge, Jane Stabro, Professor in Romantic Literature at the

University of St Andrews, and Lawrence Goldman, Director of the Institute of Historical Research

at the University of London. Clive Oppenheimer, can you describe the eruption of Mount

Tambora in 1815?

Volcanot just have a technical term for eruptions of this scale and size.

It's colossal. It was a huge event larger than anything

we've seen in the modern period. We have a magnitude scale a little bit like

the Richera scale which is a measure of the energy, the thermal energy

released by an eruption and we measure that by trying to estimate the volume or the mass of

...