The Skaftáreldar, or Laki Fissure Eruption

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:22):
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,

(00:43):
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,

(01:07):
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

(01:27):
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.

(01:52):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:35):
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,

(02:58):
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

(03:21):
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

(03:44):
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

(04:05):
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,

(04:26):
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

(04:49):
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.

(05:15):
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

(05:37):
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.

(05:58):
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,

(06:24):
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

(06:46):
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

(07:08):
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

(07:31):
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

(07:51):
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

(08:12):
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,

(08:32):
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

(08:54):
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

(09:16):
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

(09:40):
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

(10:04):
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

(10:26):
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,

(10:46):
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

(11:07):
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

(11:29):
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

(11:52):
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

(12:14):
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.

(12:35):
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,

(12:56):
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

(13:17):
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

(13:46):
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

(14:08):
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.

(14:30):
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

(14:52):
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

(15:15):
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

(15:37):
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.

(16:00):
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,

(16:21):
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

(16:42):
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.

(17:02):
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

(17:22):
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,

(17:43):
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

(18:03):
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

(18:26):
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.

(18:50):
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

(19:13):
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

(19:38):
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

(19:59):
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,

(20:21):
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

(20:44):
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

(21:05):
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

(21:25):
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

(21:48):
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

(22:10):
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

(22:32):
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,

(22:55):
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

(23:18):
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.

(23:39):
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

(24:02):
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

(24:23):
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.

(24:45):
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

(25:05):
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

(25:26):
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

(25:48):
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

(26:08):
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

(26:30):
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

(26:53):
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

(27:13):
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

(27:34):
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

(27:58):
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

(28:20):
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

(28:43):
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

(29:05):
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.

(29:27):
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

(29:49):
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

(30:12):
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

(30:35):
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

(30:56):
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.

(31:20):
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

(31:42):
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

(32:02):
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

(32:23):
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

(32:45):
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

(33:07):
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

(33:31):
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

(33:53):
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

(34:14):
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

(34:35):
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

(34:58):
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

(35:20):
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

(35:44):
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

(36:04):
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,

(36:25):
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

(36:49):
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

(37:09):
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

(37:31):
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

(37:52):
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

(38:13):
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

(38:35):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:23):
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

(39:46):
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,

(40:10):
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

(40:31):
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

(40:53):
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.

(41:13):
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

(41:34):
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

(41:56):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:38):
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

(43:00):
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

(43:20):
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,

(43:44):
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

(44:04):
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.

(44:25):
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

(44:47):
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

(45:09):
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,

(45:30):
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

(45:52):
You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
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Tracy Wilson

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