The Skaftáreldar, or Laki Fissure Eruption

Published Jul 17, 2024, 1:00 PM

The Laki Fissure Eruption was a volcanic event in Iceland in 1783 lasted for months, leading to the deaths of thousands of people and affecting the climate in a lot of the world.

Research:

  • “Laki Fissure Eruption, 1783.” URI Graduate School of Oceanography. https://volcano.uri.edu/lava/LakiEruption/Lakierupt.html
  • Barone, Jennifer. “World Versus the Volcano.” Discover. Mar 2007, Vol. 28 Issue 3, p20-20.
  • Brahic, Catherine. “Giant eruptions in Iceland led to Nile famine.” New Scientist. 11/23/2006. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10649-giant-eruptions-in-iceland-led-to-nile-famine/
  • Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Laki". Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 Oct. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/place/Laki. Accessed 2 July 2024.
  • Casey, Joan A. et al. “Sun smoke in Sweden: Perinatal implications of the Laki volcanic eruptions, 1783–1784.” Epidemiology. 2019 May ; 30(3): 330–333. doi:10.1097/EDE.0000000000000977.
  • Grattan, John and Mark Brayshay. “An Amazing and Portentous Summer: Environmental and Social Responses in Britain to the 1783 Eruption of an Iceland Volcano.” The Geographical Journal , Jul., 1995, Vol. 161, No. 2 (Jul., 1995). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3059970
  • Grattan, John et al. “Modelling the distal impacts of past volcanic gas emissions. Evidence of Europe-wide environmental impacts from gases emitted during the eruption of Italian and Icelandic volcanoes in 1783.” Quaternaire Année 1998  9-1  25-35. https://www.persee.fr/doc/quate_1142-2904_1998_num_9_1_2103
  • Gunnarsdóttir, Margrét. “Facing natural extremes: The catastrophe of the Laki eruption in Iceland, 1783–84.” 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19 (2022). 72–93. https://doi.org/10.7557/4.6611
  • Harvard Map Collection. “Laki, 1783-1784.” A Exhibition in Pusey Library from 14 Dec 2016 to 19 April 2017. https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/wheredisasterstrikes/volcano/laki-1783-1784/
  • Jackson, E.L. “The Laki Eruption of 1783: impacts on population and settlement in Iceland.” Geography , January 1982, Vol. 67, No. 1 (January 1982). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40570468
  • Karlsson, Gunnar; Kristinsson, Valdimar and Matthíasson, Björn. "Iceland". Encyclopedia Britannica, 3 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/place/Iceland. Accessed 3 July 2024.
  • Kleeman, Katrin. “A Mist Connection: An Environmental History of the Laki Eruption of 1783 and Its Legacy.” Historical Catastrophe Studies. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2023.
  • Kleemann, Katrin. “Telling Stories of a Changed Climate.” RCC Perspectives , No. 4, COMMUNICATING THE CLIMATE: From Knowing Change to Changing Knowledge (2019) Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26760163.
  • Kleemann, Katrin. “The Laki Fissure eruption, 1783-1784.” Encyclopedia of the Environment. 1/14/2020. https://www.encyclopedie-environnement.org/en/society/laki-fissure-eruption-1783-1784/
  • Klemetti, Erik. “Local and Global Impacts of the 1783-84 Laki Eruption in Iceland.” Wired. 6/7/2013. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/local-and-global-impacts-1793-laki-eruption-iceland/
  • Najork, Daniel. “Jón versus the Volcano: Reading an Eighteenth-Century Icelandic Priest’s Account of a Moment of Crisis in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Medievalist.com. https://www.medievalist.com/articles/strongjn-versus-the-volcano-an-eighteenth-century-icelandic-priests-account-of-a-moment-of-crisisstrong
  • National Science Foundation. “Tree rings and Iceland's Laki volcano eruption: A closer look at climate.” 2/3/2021. https://new.nsf.gov/news/tree-rings-icelands-laki-volcano-eruption-closer
  • Oman, Luke. “High-latitude eruptions cast shadow over the African monsoon and the flow of the Nile.” Geophysical Research Letters. 9/30/2006. https://doi.org/10.1029/2006GL027665
  • Penn State. “Benjamin Franklin: Politician, Inventor, Climatologist.” https://www.e-education.psu.edu/rocco/node/1990
  • The Economist. “The summer of acid rain.” 12/19/2007. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/the-summer-of-acid-rain
  • White, Gilbert. “The Natural History of Selborne.” January 1st, 1788. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1408/pg1408-images.html
  • Wieners, Claudia E. “Haze, Hunger, Hesitation: Disaster aid after the 1783 Laki eruption.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. Volume 406, 15 November 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0377027319305220
  • Witze, Alexandra. “Island on Fire: Societal Lessons From Iceland's Volcanoes.” Natural Hazards Observer Volume XL - Number 1 Island on Fire. 9/28/2015. https://hazards.colorado.edu/article/island-on-fire-societal-lessons-from-iceland-s-volcanoes

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start today's episode, we have one last chance to tell everyone that right now in the year twenty twenty four, July nineteenth, we are having a live show for the first time in a little bit. Yeah, we have not gotten back out there in a minute since everything's shut down, But now we are gonna have our first live show in a while at the Eugene and Marylyn Click Indiana History Center. As she said, that's Friday, July nineteenth at seven point thirty. Uh, and you can join us, and we would love that. Yeah. Tickets are available at Indianahistory dot org. We are both really looking forward to the show, really excited. It's the second time that we will have done a show at the Indiana History Center, so once again July nineteenth, twenty twenty four, seven thirty pm at the Eugene and Marylannglick, Indiana History Center and tickets available at Indiana History dot org. Poh see you there. Yeah, And well, now we'll move on to our episode today, which has nothing to do with Indiana. I think at any moment. Uh years and years ago, when we started doing Saturday Classics, we didn't really have a thought out plan for deciding what episodes to rerun. We were just kind of asked to start doing that, so we did. But we've evolved into a pattern. For the most part, I try to pick episodes that have some kind of reason to be back in the feed, whether it's related to something from a recent or upcoming episode, or something that happened on that day in history or whatever. And that means I am periodically looking at various this Day in History lists things that happened on this day. While I was trying to figure out the classic episode for June eighth of this year, one of the things on one of those lists was a volcanic eruption that happened in seventeen eighty three, and this eruption went on for months into seventeen eighty four, leading to the deaths of thousands of people, affecting the climate in the lot of the world. Really enormous incident, but it was not a volcano whose name I recognized today. This is known as Lackey or the Locky fissure or the Craters of Locke, and it's in Iceland where this event is also known as the scofft Our Elder or the scoffed Our Fires. We have a trip to Iceland planned for the podcast in November, so that was not the inspiration for this episode, but that did mean and I checked in with Holly before starting on it to be like, Holly, is it okay to talk about some like terrible Icelandic volcanoes a few months before we go to Iceland? Holly said, sure, I mean I grew up with Mount Helen's not the same, but I forgot that, you know. Yeah, I'm like this was cool. Also, just like, expect our pronunciation of Icelandic to be very, very bad. I know, folks really really mean well when they send us things like big descriptions of how to pronounce different sounds and different languages. I assure you I already spent so much time with this. We are gonna do our best. Icelandic is a very different language from English in a lot of ways. Oh yeah, I mean I had a wonderful experience when I was there last year with one of our guides who was talking about how difficult it is to learn Icelandic. And he was like, even for Icelanders, and he pulled up on his phone because he grew up there. He's like, here, twenty different ways to say this one word. Like sometimes there there are challenges. So for outsiders, Yeah, we'll talk more about about Icelandic and some things that I really love about the Icelandic language on our Friday behind the scenes. But like I'm just gonna say, I'm struggling with how to say words. So, Iceland was settled by the Norse during the Viking Age, likely in the ninth century. The two main accounts of the settlement of Iceland give slightly different timelines. Although people had absolutely visited Iceland before this point, it had no human inhabitants before the Norse arrived. Over time, Iceland became an independent commonwealth governed by a parliament called the All Thing, with Icelandic growing into its own language similar to Norse dialects found mainly in western Norway. Iceland's first inhabitants were polytheistic, but in the tenth century Christian missionaries arrived, and Iceland eventually became a Christian nation. After the Protestant Reformation, Iceland became Lutheran. Iceland had come under the control of Norway in the thirteenth century, and Norway and Denmark had united in the fourteenth century. During the Reformation, Denmark Norway was also becoming a Lutheran nation, and this process of establishing Lutheranism in Iceland increased the Danish influence there. There was some violence involved in all of the things that I just said. We're not really getting into any of that. I'm just trying to give a very basic sense of where Iceland was as a nation by the seventeen hundreds, Although Iceland was under Danish control, the Danish didn't have a lot of investment in the day to day realities of life there. From the point of view of King Christian the seventh and the government in Copenhagen, Iceland was mainly a source of revenue thanks to exports of things like fish and wool, and its need to import a lot of basic necessities and resources, including wood and iron, which because of the trade monopoly, it could only get from Denmark. This scenario was not unique to Iceland. Denmark also control Old other islands in the North Atlantic and had a similar outlook with them as well. There were some Danish officials living in Iceland, but Icelandic leaders could often just make their own decisions, especially if they were unanimously agreed on something, or if the issue at hand wasn't something that would be of particular importance to the crown. In the eighteenth century, Iceland was almost entirely rural, with a total population of only about fifty thousand people, and those folks mostly lived along the coast, since the interior of Iceland is really rugged and a lot of it's covered by glaciers. Today, Raykivic is the capital of Iceland and is home to almost half of its population, but in the seventeen eighties there were only about three hundred people living in that area. It was more like a trading post and a fishing village than like a really established city or town. Reykievic wasn't formally granted municipal powers until three years after this eruption happened, and in fact, there were no chartered towns anywhere in Iceland until seventeen eighty six. Only a very few people in Iceland had any kind of wealth at this point. These were typically people like landowners and merchants or royal officials from Denmark. Virtually everyone else was a tenant farmer or a worker on a tenant farm, or perhaps they worked in the fishing trade. Governors, magistrates, and clergy were overwhelmingly also working as farmers. The soil in Iceland and the short growing season were not well suited for a lot of crops, so a lot of people were raising cows or sheep for their milk and meat, and in the case of sheep, for their wool. People also raised horses for both transportation and labor. There really wasn't much currency in circulation in Iceland in the eighteenth century, and most people got what they needed through bartering. There was sort of a general understanding that everyone had a right to food and shelter, so when things were more difficult than usual, people usually took steps to try to make sure everyone was taken care of. At the same time, pauperism and vagrancy were seen as unacceptable, so people who had lost their homes or their farms for whatever reason would be resettled or assigned to a contract to work for another farmer. Sometimes this was basically involuntary, but even looking out for each other, virtually everyone in Iceland was living at a subsistence level, so if a massive disaster struck, it was possible that there just wouldn't be enough to go around, and of course there were disasters. Iceland sits on the mid Atlantic Ridge, which is the longest mountain chain in the world, running all the way from the Arctic Ocean to Antarctica. Almost all of this range is under the Atlantic Ocean, but there are some islands and archipelagos where it breaks through the surface, and these places are home to a lot of earthquakes and volcanic activity because the mid Atlantic Ridge is where the North American, Eurasian and African tectonic plates meet and are continually but slowly moving apart. The discovery of the mid Atlantic Ridge in the nineteenth century was part of what confirmed that Alfred Wegener's idea on continental drift, which we have talked about on the show before, were at least partially correct. So volcanoes are, of course one of the disasters that can have a major effect on life in Iceland. People often say that volcanoes erupt at certain intervals, or they'll describe specific volcanoes as overdue for an eruption, but volcanoes are really not on any kind of timetable. Broadly speaking, though, there's at least one volcanic eruption somewhere in Iceland about every three to five years, and small earthquakes happen pretty much continually. I googled how many earthquakes in Iceland and it was like five hundred a week, most of them two week for people to just feel them walking around. But during the eighteenth century there were also other disasters as well, including outbreaks of smallpox and other diseases, as well as periods of severe weather and famine. The volcanic eruption we're talking about today took place during the period of overall global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, that stretched from about the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. As we've discussed on the show before, this was more complicated than just the world was cooler, but it did mean that life in Iceland, particularly in the winters, could be especially difficult. The waters around Iceland were home to fishing fleets from all around Europe, but during colder months the ports could freeze over, meaning that people couldn't get there or they could not leave. During the coldest, darkest months of the year, merchants would arrive with the last ship full of cargo in the fall and then live in Iceland until they could take the first shipment back to Denmark in the spring. Sending someone to Denmark on a ship was the only way to ask for help, but for months at a time, no ships could be sent to do that if help was needed. All this means that by the time this eruption happened, Iceland really had its own attitudes and cultural memory about volcanoes and hardships. The ongoing threat of volcanoes had just become a fact of life, and Iceland had a really long history of dealing with and responding to things like plagues and famine. People had found ways to adapt to Iceland's climate and geology and to recover in the wake of things like volcanic eruptions and other disasters. But the eruptions that are recorded as starting in June of seventeen eighty three were massive, not necessarily unprecedented, but well beyond anything in living memory. There are a number of ways to describe the size of a volcanic eruption, and one is the volume of lava produced. It's estimated that this eruption produced twelve point three cubic kilometers or two point ninety five cubic miles of lava, which covered five hundred ninety nine square kilometers or two hundred thirty one square miles of land. In Iceland's recorded history, only one eruption is known to have produced a greater volume of lava than this one. That's Eldya, or the Fire Gorge, which is to the southwest of the Laki fissures, and it's part of the same volcanic system as the volcano Katla. Eldya erupted from the spring of nine thirty nine until the autumn of nine forty, and it produced an estimated nineteen cubic kilometers or four point five cubic miles of lava. So that was almost eight hundred years before the Laki Fissier eruption, only about a century after Iceland was first settled, not something that people had in their collective memories at that point. Really, these numbers measuring lava volume and land coverage are so big that they're actually pretty hard to conceptualize. In the book A misst Connection and Environmental History of the Locky Eruption and its Legacy, doctor Katrin Kleman puts it in terms of Olympic sized swimming pools. At its peak, the Locki eruption could have filled more than two Olympic sized swimming pools every second. And this was not just about the lava. As dramatic as that sounds, we will get to more about that after a sponsor break. The Locky Fissures, or Locky craters as they're often known today, are in this generally more southern part of Iceland, running northeast to southwest, with the Locky Mountain roughly in the middle of this chain of fissures. They're part of a broader volcanic system called Grimsvoten, which is Iceland's most productive volcanic system. Grimsvoten produces a volcanic eruption roughly every two to seven years on average. I think it's been a little more often more recently. Part of this system runs under the Vatani Yolkle Glacier, which is Iceland's largest ice cap and the second largest ice cap in all of Europe. So eruptions within the system can be really dramatic and cause huge ash plumes as this volcanic material interacts with the Glacier. The nearest settlement to these fissures is Kurkee Byer Cloister, which means church Farm Cloister and is often referred to just as Cloister. This is on the coast on Route one, also called the Ring Road, which is what encircles Iceland today, and this region of Iceland is known as the Fire Districts. Today, Iceland has lots of monitoring to measure seismic activity in the presence of gases that can give some advanced warning of a volcanic eruption, but that, of course, was not the case in seventeen eighty three. The number and duration of earthquakes had probably been increasing for a while before the eruption started, but it wasn't until May that they were strong enough for people to start noticing them. Around May twentieth, sailors on a Danish ship called the Torskin also reported seeing fires in the mountains. This account is not very exact, but it is possible that something was erupting in the mountains that the people on the coast couldn't feel or see from their vantage point, either from the area around Lockey or elsewhere in the Grims Vaughten system. One of our major sources of information about this eruption is the riding of Lutheran pastor Jan Stangerson, who was originally from northern Iceland. In addition to his religious duties, he tended to the medical needs of his parish as sort of a self taught doctor. Stangerson wrote an autobiography, which was one of the first autobiographies written in Icelandic, as well as a treatise about this eruption. This treatise became known as the Fire Treatise, and for reasons that we will be getting to, Stangerson became known as the Fire Priest. According to Stangerson's account, by the start of June seventeen eighty three, the earthquakes in the area had become quite pronounced. June eighth was the holiday of Pentecost, also called Whitsunday, which is observed on the seventh Sunday after Easter. At about nine in the morning, people living in the area around Cloister could see dark clouds of ash billowing up from the mountains to the north of the settlement. Stingerson wrote that the cloud was so dense that it blocked out the sun, making it seem dark as night when people were indoors and that rain started to fall. That was like black ink. Eventually the ash cloud cleared and people in Cloister could see the light of fires from up in the mountains. For the people living near the coast around Cloister for the next few days, it was obvious that something was going on to the north of them, but they really didn't have much detail. Roughly speaking, the Locky fissures are about fifty kilometers or thirty miles north of the coast through increasingly difficult terrain. So people could see fires, plumes of ash and occasional fireballs in the distance, and sometimes they could hear the sounds of the eruption and its after effects. The air was also really thick and foul smelling, but they couldn't just like walk out to the side of the eruption to see what was actually happening. It didn't really seem right away like they were in some kind of immediate danger from a lava flow, though. But then on June tenth, the water in the Scoffta glacial River to the west of Cloister evaporated and within a day it had filled with lava. Then Cloister was hit with a snowstorm, which Stingersoon said lasted for five days, with the snow seeming to come from the volcanic cloud. The people in Cloister did not know this, but at this point a second volcanic fissure had opened in the highlands above them. Although the eruption had initially seemed like something that was happening in the Icelandic interior, by mid June that lava flow down and around the Glacial River valley was threatening the settlement, and by July eighteenth a lot of people in Cloister started to think that its destruction was inevitable. In addition to the lava, there was just continual smoke and foul air and a lot of lightning. Even so, Stangerson held church services as normal on Sunday, July twentieth, expecting that this was going to be the last time that he held services in Oyster. The lava flow seemed to be approaching the church when services started, but when services ended, the edge of the floe was still in the same spot. Stingerson described the lava as piling up on itself, rather than continuing to advance and then being drowned in a flow of water from nearby lakes and rivers. This service was later named the Eldmasson or Fire Service, and this is when Stingerson became known as the Fire Priest. As the eruption continued, another fissure opened and another glacial river evaporated, this one the kaver Vishnut to the northeast of Cloister, as had happened with the Skafta River. Once the water was gone, the entire river gorge filled with lava, and then the lava broke out of that gorge and started spreading across the land, destroying several farms. This cycle of new fissures opening and new surges of law continued repeatedly until October, with this chain of fissures ultimately stretching across about twenty seven kilometers or seventeen miles. Although the eruption is considered to have peaked over the summer in early fall, less intense volcanic activity continued until at least February of seventeen eighty four. Yeah, I found some accounts that put the end of it in like seventeen eighty five, but seventeen eighty four seems to be what most sources coalesce around uh We've mostly been talking about the lava flows and the settlement around Cloister, but another major issue was gases being emitted from the volcano and that affected all of Iceland. Over the course of these eruptions, these fissures emitted roughly one hundred and twenty two megatons of sulfur dioxide and eight megatons of fluorine. These and other gases caused a thick haze to settle over a lot of Iceland and other parts of the world which we will be getting to. These gases caused a lot of health effects, including respiratory illnesses, especially in people who had conditions like asthma, as well as pregnancy losses and even deaths. The sulfur dioxide stayed close to the ground and caused acid rain that defoliated plants and irritated and burned the skin. The fluorine contaminated much of the grasses and other forage that were grown for livestock, and the livestock who ate those things died, including an estimated ten thousand cattle, twenty seven thousand horses, and one hundred ninety thousand sheep. By some estimates. This killed more than seventy percent of the livestock in Iceland, and those gases blocked the sun all across Iceland, which had a psychological impact as well as an environmental one. The winters in Iceland are long and cold and dark, like this year, on the winter solstice, the sun is going to rise in raykievic at eleven twenty two am and then it's gonna set at three point thirty PM, so the sun will be above the horizon for a little more than four hours. But on the summer solstice this year, the sun rose at two fifty five AM and then it's set a little after midnight, and then the hours between sunset and sunrise those were still in twilight. So the summer in Iceland was supposed to be a time that was more plentiful than the rest of the year, when people felt a lot more joyful and free than they did during this long dark of the winter months. Instead, in seventeen eighty three, the sun was dim and the air was toxic, and then that was accompanied by hunger and illnesses and dying livestock. The effects of all these gases became known as the mist hardships or mist famine. Then When winter returned, it was much colder than normal, likely connected to all the volcanic materials in the atmosphere. The widespread livestock deaths led to critical shortages of food. At times, the haze had made it impossible to get out to sea to fish, so even fish was in short supply as well. Officials in Copenhagen had learned of this eruption in September of seventeen eighty three when a merchant ship arrived from Iceland and King Christian the seventh had dispatched a ship full of grain and a team to assess what was happening in report back. But because of various delays and the colder than normal weather, the relief ship encountered ice in the fjords around Denmark and it had to take shelter in Norway over the winter. Because of this and the ice around Iceland, sports the grain didn't actually get there until April, and then distributing it to outlying areas was almost impossible because so many horses had died. In addition to the long break in communications over the winter, one of the big challenges involving relief efforts from Denmark was that the Crown was reluctant to take action on what was happening in Iceland if they didn't think they had enough information about what was going on. But since the only way to get that information was by ship, it took forever to arrive, especially in the winter when conditions were the worst. Denmark's trade monopoly with Iceland also meant that there weren't ships from other nations that might have been able to get a message somewhere faster. In seventeen eighty four, trading ships bound for Iceland from Denmark were ordered not to turn back if they encountered ice, but to wait until it cleared so their supplies could be delivered with less delay. Relief efforts from within Iceland were also, for the most part ineffective. In theory, Officials in Iceland had the right to ban food exports during times of emergency, but not long before this eruption started, Iceland had been admonished by the Crown for purportedly abusing this right. Merchants whose livelihoods came from exports were also reluctant to comply with orders to keep their goods in Iceland instead, so dried fish and mutton that could have helped sustain the population over the winter of seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four had been exported by the time that winter started, and then when exports were banned in early seventeen eighty four, it was only from the ports to the west and northwest of the island. Famine and shortages continued in Iceland into the difficult winter of seventeen eighty four to seventeen eighty five, during which Iceland also faced a smallpox epidemic. In the end, about twenty percent of Iceland's population died as a result of this volcanic eruption, most of them from exposure to toxic gases or from starvation. Some froze to death because of fuel shortages during the colder than normal winters. About fifteen percent of Iceland's farms were abandoned after the eruption. Before the eruption, the parish at Cloister had six hundred and thirteen members. Afterward there were only ninety three. Some had left, but many of them had died. Iceland's population didn't start to return to pre seventeen eighty three levels until the eighteen tens. After this, officials in Denmark and Iceland started working on a plan to both rebuild Iceland's economy after this disaster and to establish free trade. Free trade would be put into place over the following years. Dissatisfaction with Denmark's relief efforts during this crisis has also been cited as an influence on a movement for Icelandic independence. Although Iceland did not transition towards being a self governing nation for more than a century after this, and initially that was kind of a home rule situation, Iceland became a fully independent republic in nineteen forty four. This eruption also had a major impact outside of Iceland, and we're going to talk about that after a sponsor break. The Lackey Fissier eruption took place in the context of the Enlightenment in Europe, which was of course a period associated with a lot of interest and curiosity about science and the natural world. A lot of the scientific disciplines that are involved in studying volcanoes and environmental phenomena today were really just starting to develop at the end of the eighteenth century. So the effects of the eruption in Europe caused a lot of concerns about things like the weather and acid rain and a strangely red sun, but also a lot of fascination. Because of the confluence of weather and atmospheric phenomena, some sources describe seventeen eighty three as an anismerabolis or a year of wonders. The enormous quantity of volcanic gases that released from the Lacki Fissier eruption caused a conspicuous haze to form over a lot of the northern hemisphere, including North America, North Africa, and most of Europe. It was reported as far away as Syria to the southeast, and to the Altai Mountain range in Mongolia to the east. Many reports of this haze describe it as a dry fog, and it persisted all over Europe until August or September. In some places it may have lasted until October, although in written accounts it becomes hard to distinguish between the dry fog of the Lachi eruption and ordinary autumnal fog caused by moisture in the air. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, who was in Paris as the US Minister to France, quote during several of the summer months of the year, seventeen eighty three, when the effect of the sun's raised to heat the earth in these northern regions should have been greater, there existed a constant fog over all of Europe and great part of North America. This fog was of a permanent nature. It was dry, and the rays of the sun seemed to have little effect towards dissipating it, as they easily do a moist fog arising from water. They were indeed rendered so faint in passing through it, that when collected in the focus of a burning glass, they would scarce kindle brown paper. Of course, their summer effect in heating the earth was exceedingly diminished. Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted and received continual additions. Hence the air was more chilled and the winds more severely cold. He went on to say, quote, the cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained, whether it was adventitious to this earth, and merely a smoke proceeding from the consumption by fire of some of those great burning balls or globes which we happened to meet with in our rapid course. Round the sun, and which are sometimes seen to kindle and be destroyed in passing our atmosphere, and whose smoke might be attracted and retained by our earth. Or whether it was the vast quantity of smoke long continuing to issue during the summer from Hecla in Iceland and that other volcano which arose out of the seat near that island, which smoke might be spread by various winds over the northern part of the world, is yet uncertain. It seems, however, worthy the inquiry whether other hard winters recorded in history were preceded by similar, permanent and widely extended summer fogs, because if found to be so, men might, from such fogs conjecture the probability of succeeding hard winter, and of the damage to be expected by the breaking up of frozen rivers in the spring, and take such measures as are possible and practicable to secure themselves and effects from the mischiefs that attend the last Franklin first proposed that this strange haze might have been the result of a volcanic eruption in seventeen eighty four, but he wasn't actually the first person in Europe to do so. That was French naturalist Jacques Antoine Moorge de Montredon in an address before the Royal Society of Sciences of Montpillier on August seventh, seventeen eighty three. Before that early freeze, Franklin described the weather in much of Europe was hotter than normal in some areas. The high temperature records set during this summer of seventeen eighty three would not be broken for a century or more. More recent climate modeling studies have concluded that this heat wave was an unusual climate variation that wasn't related to the volcano, and that without all the volcanic material in the atmosphere, it actually would have been worse, but people didn't know that at the time, and a number of written accounts from that summer reference both the dry fog and the heat. As one example, English writer and art historian Horace Walpole wrote a letter to Lady Austhree on July fifteenth, said in part quote, as much as I love to have summer in summer, I am tired of this weather. The dreaded East is all the wind that blows it, partses the leaves, makes the turf crisp claps the doors, blows the papers about, and keeps one in a constant mist that gives no dew, but might as well be smoke. The sun sets like a pewter plate, red hot, and then in a moment appears the Moon at a distance of the same complexion, just as the same orbit a moving picture serves for both. Naturalist Gilbert White similarly linked the haze and the heat in his natural History of Selborne, which was presented as a collection of letters. One to the Honorable Danes Barrington read in part quote, the summer of the year seventeen eighty three was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena. For besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this Kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fog that prevailed from many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known with the memory of man. By my journal, I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June twenty third to July twentieth inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun at noon looked as blank as a clouded moon and shed a rust colored, ferruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood colored at rising and setting. All the time, the heat was so intense that butcher's meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed, and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic and riding irksome. The meteor he mentions, and that Franklin kind of alluded to in his riding was the Great Medior of seventeen eighty three, which was visible across much of Britain and Ireland on August eighteenth. At the time, meteors weren't clearly differentiated from comets and a lot of writing, and they also weren't very well understood, and there were a lot of people who thought that this meteor and the dry fog were somehow connected. The northern hemisphere saw a lot of the same effects as Iceland did as a result of this dry haze that summer, like acid rain that defoliated trees and damaged crops and killed insects and respiratory illnesses and other negative health effects. Over the summer. There were a lot of worries that this was going to lead to a massive crop failure, but by harvest time a lot of crops seemed to have recovered, especially fruit and wine grapes. A lot of vineyards in particular had a bumper crop. The winter, however, was a lot colder than usual. More recent research suggests that temperatures all across Europe fell by about one point five degrees celsius over a span of two years during and after the eruption. That's the kind of shift that can cause huge changes in the day to day weather. Tree ring research in Alaska suggests that seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four were significantly colder in northwestern North America as well. A study published just a couple of years ago tried to figure out why the tree rings reflected a colder year in seventeen eighty three, even though this eruption didn't actually start until June, and they found differences in the cell walls of the cells that made up the rings, showing evidence later in the year that had evidence of a steep temperature drop that happened later on. This colder winter meant that there was a lot more snow and ice and frozen over waterways, and in a lot of the northern hemisphere a lot of flooding that followed in the spring thaw. And there's some research to suggest that the volcanic eruption and its effects on the atmosphere also affected the monsoon season northern Africa and the Indian subcontinent and the periodic flooding of the Nile River as well. French philosopher Constantine Flancois de Chais beuf Comte de Vounis wrote of the Nile quote, the inundation of seventeen eighty three was not sufficient. Great part of the lands therefore could not be sown for want of being watered, and another part was in the same predicament for want of seed. In seventeen eighty four, the Nile again did not rise to the favorable height, and the dearth immediately became excessive. Soon after the end of November, the famine carried off at Cairo nearly as many as the plague. The streets which before were full of beggars now afforded not a single one. All had perished or deserted the city. An estimated fifteen to twenty percent of the population of the Nile River Valley died in the wake of these famines, and the disruption to the monsoon season is also cited as a factor and the Chelisa famines of the Indian subcontinent in seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four, although that disruption has also been connected to an unusual phase in the cyclical climate pattern known as El Nino, which may or may not have been volcano related. Although Jacques de Montredon and Benjamin Franklin each suggested that these climate and weather phenomena may have been connected to a volcanic eruption in seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four, it took a while for this to be well studied and understood. At first, documentation of the eruption itself was pretty minimal. In seventeen eighty five, Magnus Stevenson wrote a work translated as Short Description of the New Volcanic Eruption in Iceland that was published in Danish in Copenhagen, Icelandic naturalist and physicians Van Pausen, who studied the glaciers and volcanoes of Iceland, was the first person to find the Lacky fissure system in seventeen ninety four. I think the fact that it was more than a decade after the volcanoes that somebody actually found where the fissures were like illustrates how difficult the terrain is. I find this person really fascinating though he walked a whole bunch of glaciers and just went looking for volcanoes and things. But I'm not sure there's enough information available to do a whole episode on him. In eighteen fifteen, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, leading to what came to be known as the Year Without a Summer. We have an episode on this in the archive, which we ran as a Saturday Classic last year. The Year Without a Summer is probably better known in a lot of Europe and North America than the Lackey eruption, thanks in part to a lot of artwork and literature that grew out of it, including novels like Frankenstein and Dracula, and some of the artwork of Casper David Friedrich We've talked about Casper David Friedrich on the show as well. Yeah, prior hosts talked about Frankenstein and Dracula, and yeah, all of it. We have covered all of these things in abundance. There are so many parallels between these two eruptions and there after effects. But it really wasn't until the eighteen eighty three eruption of Krakatau that scientists and researchers really started to get a handle on this connection and working backward to study the climate and weather effects of earlier eruptions. Today, this is often described as a volcanic winter. There is still a lot of research being done into the locky Fissier eruption. Papers that we mentioned about things like tree ring research and climate modeling were all published in twenty twenty or later. It's possible that further research will find evidence of effects in the southern hemisphere as well. Pretty Much everything that I came across in connection for this episode was focused on the northern hemisphere, but it's possible that this was really something global. Do you have any listener mail that's less eruptive? I do I have listener mail. This is from Alfred and Alfred wrote, after our discussions of Google street View images inside a museum, this email says, Hey, they're Tracy and Holly. Your podcast behind the Scenes and email sections discussing the Google street View of museums reminded me that our museum, the Centennial Center of Science and Technology aka the Ontario Science Center, had Google come through in September twenty twelve. They were going to record walks through the entire center, but stopped after completing only about a third of our daunting, multi level four hundred and eighty thousand square feet of public exhibit space. Unfortunately, they missed some areas that may have been of interest to you, the Banting and Best Lab that was transferred from the University of Toronto to the Center, I believe in nineteen sixty nine as it opened. The Ontario Science Center is also the proud owner of a working nineteenth century Jaccard loom owned by weaver John Campbell of Ontario, which operated daily weaving demonstrations. The third is the largest museum collection of whimsical artwork by Roland Emmett, which is brought out and displayed every winter holiday season. Many of the pieces can be seen in the movie Chitty Chitty Bank Bank. I did say that unfortunately Google missed these exhibits as they will no longer be available for the public to view in their historic fifty five year old building as it was suddenly closed on June twenty first due to building safety concerns due to a very long run of financial starvation and neglect by the provincial governments. I've been walking past these and hundreds of other exhibits, both new and old, for twenty four years and will miss them. It will be some consolation that Google has recorded some of these pass through the center, and I will be able to revisit the memory of those halls after they are torn down, that is, until Google decides to update their street view. I hope they have some sort of archive for me and others to peruse occasionally in the future. I hope that the new, much smaller center, to be located on the waterfront will have enough room to accommodate at least so some of these historically significant, scientific, technological, and artistic artifacts. Thank you for your most wonderful podcast that has been part of my daily fifty miles one way commute for many years. I am almost an sym IHC PhD. Member, as there are a couple of episodes that make me too queasy to drive and I've never gotten through them, I e. The Blood Transfusion one be Your personalities make the podcast a joy to listen to, and I laugh and shuckle to your silliness and perspectives. A gigly podcast where I learned something makes my day. As a subject suggestion, maybe some of the above paragraph could be topics for future podcasts. I would also like to suggest Elsie McGill, Queen of the Hurricanes, born March twenty ninth, nineteen oh five. Her one hundred and twentieth birthday is coming up. There's something inspiring about her story that I've liked ever since. We had a small exhibit about her contributions to women in the field of engineering. So as a levy of Canadian duty for you, I have included a Canada Day picture of our thirteen year old Corgi Clover, born on St. Patrick's Day. Clover was rescued from a breeder when she was retired from show and breeding programs. Not apparently a goofy, loud barking Corgie, but a calm and serene dog, liking people a lot more than other animals. And then there's also a thirteen year old house bunny named Dash and Clover and Dash are close friends, but not buddies. Dash would like to be Clover's buddy, but Clover is not having any of it. I think she fears for having to share her kibble. I cannot get over how adorable these animals are. Holy moly. I mean, Corgi's are a cute breed of dog in general, but what a sweety pie. And then we have also a rabbit next to just a buffet of green vegetation to be eaten, also incredibly cute, Thank you so much. I went and looked around the street of the recently closed Ontario Science Center and a lot of what was captured is like the ground level, so you see lots of things like the cafe and where do I tickets? And locker storage and that kind of stuff. One of the things I had noticed about the Franklin Institute. The Franklin Institute has multiple floors, and the street view images that I could get to were all on the ground floor. I'm not sure Google had a great way to figure out how to differentiate different levels within a building. And I know that having lived in Atlanta and driven through the middle of Atlanta where you have like multiple interstates and bridges and roads that are sort of in layers. Sometimes the turn by turn instructions, at least when I was living there, would absolutely freak out and be very confused about where you were on these things that were essentially on top of each other. Oh yeah, so that just made me curious about the street. You. There are a lot of user uploaded images for the Science Center, so as you know, as long as Google keeps those kinds of things available, those do still exist, not as a walkthrough of the museum, but just pictures that you can scroll through. So thank you so much for this email. And man, these pictures such a cute dog, cute bunny, awesome bunny. I want them to solve crime together. Yeah, I think that's great. One very last chance to say, hey, come see us if you live in Indianapolis. July nineteenth, seven thirty Indiana History Center tickets available at Indianahistory dot org. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcas casts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,440 clip(s)