The Year Without Summer Read Online Free

and probably saved
     a substantial number of lives on the more distant islands as the rain washed the ash
     off crops and provided fresh drinking water to help stem an incipient epidemic of
     fever. But nothing could save those closer to Tambora. Over the following month, thousands
     more perished—some from severe respiratory infections from the ash that remained in
     the atmosphere in the aftermath of the eruption, others from violent diarrhoeal disease,
     the result of drinking water contaminated with acidic ash. The same deadly ash poisoned
     crops, especially the vital rice fields, raising the death toll higher. Horses and
     cattle perished by the hundreds, mainly from a lack of forage. Lieutenant Owen Phillips,
     dispatched by Raffles to investigate conditions and provide an emergency supply of
     rice to the inhabitants, arrived in Bima several weeks after the eruption and reported
     that “the extreme misery to which the inhabitants have been reduced is shocking to
     behold. There were still on the road side the remains of several corpses, and the
     marks of where many others had been interred: the villages almost entirely deserted
     and the houses fallen down, the surviving inhabitants having dispersed in search of
     food.” In the nearby village of Dompo, residents were reduced to eating stalks of
     papaya and plantain, and the heads of palm. Even the Raja of Sanggar lost a daughter
     to hunger.
    In the end, perhaps another seventy to eighty thousand people died from starvation
     or disease caused by the eruption, bringing the death toll to nearly ninety thousand
     in Indonesia alone. No other volcanic explosion in history has come close to wreaking
     disaster of that magnitude.
    And yet there would be more casualties from Tambora. In addition to millions of tons
     of ash, the force of the eruption threw 55 million tons of sulfur-dioxide gas more
     than twenty miles into the air, into the stratosphere. There, the sulfur dioxide rapidly
     combined with readily available hydroxide gas—which, in liquid form, is commonly known
     as hydrogen peroxide—to form more than 100 million tons of sulfuric acid. The sulfuric
     acid condensed into minute droplets—each two hundred times finer than the width of
     a human hair—that could easily remain suspended in the air as an aerosol cloud. The
     strong stratospheric jet streams quickly accelerated the particles to a velocity of
     about sixty miles per hour, blowing primarily in an east-to-west direction. The sheer
     power of the jet stream allowed the aerosol cloud to circumnavigate Earth in two weeks;
     but the cloud did not remain coherent.
    Variations in the wind speed and the weight of the particles caused some parts of
     the cloud to travel faster or slower than others, and so the cloud spread as it moved
     around Earth, until it covered the equator with an almost imperceptible veil of dust
     and sulfurous particles. It also began to spread north and south, albeit far more
     slowly. While it took only two weeks for the aerosol cloud to cover the globe at the
     equator, it was likely more than two months before it reached the North and South
     Poles.
    Rather than a slow, steady broadening of the equatorial cloud into the Northern and
     Southern Hemispheres, the cloud expanded in fits and starts. As some pieces of the
     cloud were blown away from the equator, they were quickly caught up in the dominant
     stratospheric jet streams—which in May blow east to west in the Northern Hemisphere,
     and west to east in the Southern Hemisphere. The cloud soon began to resemble streamers
     or filaments, with small portions regularly pushed off the equator and into the middle
     latitudes in each hemisphere. Eventually, these filaments coalesced into a single,
     coherent cloud that covered Earth.
    And there they remained. Had the aerosol cloud ascended only into the lowest part
     of the atmosphere, the troposphere, where clouds form, rain would soon have cleansed
     the ash from the