200 years ago today - the biggest volcanic eruption of modern history

200 years ago today, the Indonesian volcano of Tambora was spewing molten rock nearly 30 miles up into the atmosphere. It is a less famous disaster than Krakatoa, also in modern-day Indonesia 68 years later, but this was the most powerful eruption of at least the last 500 years.

The immediate death toll on the island of Sumbawa, where the volcano is located, was perhaps 12,000, but across the world, hundreds of thousands may have perished in the volcanic winter that came after the eruption, as ash blotted out the sun.

It brought starvation to China's Yunnan province, hunger and disease to India, while the great chill killed many across Europe as global temperatures fell by perhaps three degrees, with the effect persisting into the following summer. There were food riots in Britain and France, while soup kitchens had to be opened in Manhattan.

The ash meant many countries experienced strange, dramatic sunsets, some of which inspired the great painter, J.M.W. Turner, while the 'wet, ungenial summer' in Switzerland confined Mary Shelley and her friends indoors. For entertainment, they had a story competition. Mary's entry was Frankenstein. The rotten weather was even thought to have contributed to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.

For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Volcanoes, eruptions and art

Visited a fascinating exhibition at Compton Verney Museum, near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, examining the way in which artists have portrayed volcanic eruptions. Vesuvius figures prominently, with a number of imaginative recreations of its devastation of Pompeii in AD79.

The 19^th century British artist John Martin, some of whose wonderfully demented pictures of the Last Judgment are exhibited in the Tate Britain, has a suitably fiery painting included. While Andy Warhol has a typically Warholesque picture of Vesuvius going up in smoke in lurid primary colours.

Also featured are a series of paintings by another 19^th century British artist, William Ascroft, who painted sketches of the psychedelic sunsets that we experienced in our skies after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, across the world in Indonesia. Volcanic eruptions made perfect subjects for perhaps the greatest of all British painters, J M W Turner, but like a number of artists represented in the show, he never saw one, and relied instead on written accounts and other people’s pictures.

Unfortunately, the exhibition is now over. I caught it on its last day.

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Coincidental quake

The earthquake that has just devastated the Indonesian island of Sumatra was a separate event from the earlier Pacific tsunami that hit Samoa (see yesterday’s blog) though some experts believe the Samoan event may have brought the Sumatran quake forward by a few days.

At least 464 people have been killed on Sumatra, though an official at Indonesia’s disaster centre predicted the death toll could eventually run into thousands. The initial shock came beneath the sea, 50 miles north-west of the city of Padang. An eye-witness said many concrete buildings had collapsed and that fires were burning in the ruins.

Indonesia is in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire”, the most seismically active region on earth, which suffers up to 7,000 earthquakes a year. Five thousand people were killed by a quake in Yogyakarta in 2006, while 170,000 Indonesians perished in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

The country has also suffered some of the world’s most notorious volcanic eruptions such as Tambora in 1815, and Krakatoa in 1883. The most powerful of all, though, struck Sumatra about 74,000 years ago, when the Toba eruption and the volcanic winter that followed wiped out 99 per cent of the human race. See A Disastrous History of the World.

World's biggest volcanic eruptions

This week the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was rocked by an earthquake. No great surprise there – Indonesia is the most seismically active country on earth, and was close to the epicentre of the undersea quake that sparked the great Christmas tsunami of 2004. This time there were no reports of any casualties.

How different from the great volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa 194 years ago today. The Europeans who had started to settle in the islands in the sixteenth century believed the volcano was extinct. On April 5, 1815, it proved them wrong, generating the biggest eruption in recorded history – four times as powerful as the more famous Krakatoa.

The immediate death toll on the island was about 12,000, but as so often happens with volcanoes, the worst would come later, as the debris spat out into the atmosphere made the world dramatically colder. In the months that followed, up to 80,000 are thought to have died on Sumbawa and Lombok, while it is estimated that the chill weather and resulting poor harvests may have cost another 200,000 lives in Europe alone.

An even fiercer eruption rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra in about 72,000 BC, and the volcanic winter it generated may have killed 99 per cent of the earth’s human population at that time. The full story of all these eruptions is in A Disastrous History of the World.