Year Without a Summer
The exceptionally cold year of 1816 in Western Europe and North America, caused mainly by the eruption of Tambora: summer frosts and snowfalls destroyed the harvests, and famine, food riots and epidemics followed.
- Date
- 1816year known
- Place
- New Englandapproximate locationtoday: Northeastern United States · North America
- Threads
- The world in the Age of Revolution
In New England snow fell on 7–8 June and there were frosts every month; the crop failure pushed thousands of farmers to move to the Midwest. In Europe, not yet recovered from the Napoleonic Wars, the summer was the coldest in the observation record from 1766 to 2000; famine and food riots swept Britain and France, and typhus epidemics spread in 1816–1819.
The bad weather kept Mary Shelley and Lord Byron indoors for long stretches at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva — where the idea of Frankenstein was born. The place on the map is nominal: the anomaly affected the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Connections
Causes and preconditions
- Eruption of Mount Tambora5–11 April 1815 · Southeast Asia and Oceania
Meanwhile in the world
Other regions, within a year of this event
Western and Central Europe
- Holy Alliance14 (26) September 1815
- Battle of Waterloo18 June 1815
- Hundred Days20 March – 8 July 1815
- Napoleon’s return from Elba26 February – 20 March 1815
- Congress of ViennaSeptember 1814 – 9 June 1815
Southeast Asia and Oceania
- Eruption of Mount Tambora5–11 April 1815