Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook Iâ??ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleonâ??s final defeat in Belgium on June 18, 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years.
The death toll claimed around 100,000 people, from the thick pyroclastic flows of lava, from the tsunami that struck nearby coasts, and from the thick ash that blanketed South-East Asiaâ??s farmlands, destroyed crops and plunged it into darkness for a week. Both events â?? Napoleonâ??s defeat and the eruption â?? had monumental impacts on human history. But while a library of scholarship has been devoted to Napoleonâ??s undoing at Waterloo, the scattered writings on Tambora would scarcely fill your in-tray.
This extraordinary geological event took place 199 years ago this week, and on the cusp of its bicentenary Tambora is finally getting its due. With the help of modern scientific instruments and old-fashioned archival detective work, the Tambora 1815 eruption can be conclusively placed among the greatest environmental disasters ever to befall mankind. The floods, droughts, starvation, and disease in the three years following the eruption stem from the volcanoâ??s effects on weather systems, so Tambora stands today as a harrowing case study of what the human costs and global reach might be from runaway climate change.
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