Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World

✍ Scribed by Gillen D’Arcy Wood

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 312
• Edition: Course Book
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano’s massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale.

Here, Gillen D’Arcy Wood traces Tambora’s global and historical reach: how the volcano’s three-year climate change regime initiated the first worldwide cholera pandemic, expanded opium markets in China, and plunged the United States into its first economic depression. Bringing the history of this planetary emergency to life, Tambora sheds light on the fragile interdependence of climate and human societies to offer a cautionary tale about the potential tragic impacts of drastic climate change in our own century.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Illustrations
Note on Measurements
Introduction. Frankenstein’s Weather
One. The Pompeii of the East
Two. The Little (Volcanic) Ice Age
Three. “This End of the World Weather”
Four. Blue Death in Bengal
Five. The Seven Sorrows of Yunnan
Six. The Polar Garden
Seven. Ice Tsunami in the Alps
Eight. The Other Irish Famine
Nine. Hard Times at Monticello
Epilogue. Et in Extremis Ego
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index