Thread: Indonesia - Mount Tambora 10 times more powerful than Krakatoa!

April 10, 2009
Mauricio Claudio Lopez-Rivera

The Year Without Summer
The sound of thunderous explosions hung over the Java Sea on April 5, 1815, provoking widespread fear among residents and the colonial administration in Batavia that an attack was imminent. Across the globe in Europe, Napoleon’s forces had overrun much of the continent and occupied the Netherlands.

Thomas Stamford Raffles, the British lieutenant-governor of the Dutch East Indies, who had taken control of Batavia to prevent it from falling into Napoleon’s hands, dispatched a small flotilla on a reconnaissance mission to determine whether the bursts posed a threat to British military positions on Java. The colonial administration in Makassar, on Sulawesi’s southern terminus, likewise dispatched a mission, hoping to come upon a friendly force rather than an adversary, for the administration felt sure it was powerless to withstand an attack from a naval force capable of unleashing such continuous bursts.

In East Java, in Ternate and in many other places throughout the archipelago, local communities received the bursts with hopeful apprehension. Religious leaders proclaimed that such a terrifying display from the heavens signified that European colonial subjugation was coming to an end. Their hopes were dashed by the relative quiet that ensued over the following days. Until the 11th of April, that is, when the expectation of deliverance from colonial rule turned for many into fear that the end of the world was at hand.

On April 11, 1815, after a respite of five days, Mount Tambora, on Sumbawa Island in West Nusa Tenggara Province, erupted once again with such ferocity that the effects are still measurable almost 200 years later. On Sumbawa, no fewer than 10,000 people perished from the direct physical effects of the eruption. At least 40,000 more perished indirectly from the ensuing famine. Famine and disease also engulfed Lombok and areas as distant as East Java. On the nearby slopes, entire villages were engulfed and interred by the flow of mud, pumice and magma. That eruption, which claimed tens of thousands of lives and precipitated global climate change, is now known to have been the most powerful in recorded history, although it is the much smaller eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 that often gets the press — perhaps because the laying of undersea telegraph cables in the mid-1800s quickly disseminated news of the smaller blast.

In 1815, though, it took months for news of Mount Tambora to reach Europe and beyond. Nevertheless, the effects were felt worldwide.

On vacation in Switzerland the following year, writers Mary Shelley and Lord Byron experienced abnormally cold weather in normally mild Geneva. Describing the Swiss summer that year Shelley wrote in the preface to a still unfinished work, which was later to be titled “Frankenstein,” “The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire.” The climatic desolation spurred Shelley to complete her most famous work.

Byron’s “Darkness” described a similar scenario: “The bright sun was extinguish’d and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; / Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day.”

Throughout 1816 and the years thereafter, places far removed from Sumbawa — Europe, North America and India — experienced drastic changes in the prevailing weather patterns. The “wet, ungenial summer and incessant rain” experienced by Shelley and Byron that summer in Switzerland was only the local manifestation of the global effects unleashed by the Tambora eruption.

New England received snowfall during the summer months of 1816, and failed crops prompted accelerated migration to the Midwest. In New York the atmosphere so dimmed the sky that solar sunspots became visible to the naked eye. New Haven, Connecticut, experienced that year its coldest summer in the period from 1780 to 1968.

Records from the oldest French wineries tell a similar tale. Remaining stocks of 1816 vintages are scant as a result of both poor quality grapes and reduced grape harvest. Wines from that year have been widely regarded as poor quality.
In India, snow fell on Madras that year, which came to be known worldwide as the “year without a summer.”

Despite its global impact, Tambora remains largely unknown and is rarely visited, in no small measure due to the fact that its location is far from the traditional tourist destinations of Java and Lombok. Another reason is that unlike Krakatoa, Tambora has been neither the subject of a best-selling book or a Hollywood movie. This is quite remarkable when one considers that on the volcanic explosivity index, Tambora’s 1815 explosion was at least 10 times more powerful and resulted in twice as many fatalities than any belch of Krakatoa’s.

Modern science continues to reveal the true extent of that monstrous eruption. Ice core records from Greenland, Antartica and the North Pole preserved sulfuric acid layers from the Tambora eruption. In 2004 archeologists uncovered the ruins of settlements buried under three meters of lava. Intact remains of people holding farming tools are testimony to the speed with which eruption engulfed surrounding communities.

The tectonic forces that created the Tambora peninsula and the conditions for the eruption are still at play today as the Australian plate continues to be subducted beneath the Sunda plate. Scientists estimate a one in 10 chance that a similar eruption will occur within the next 50 years.

Their estimation is that the most likely place will be in Indonesia.


Jakarta Globe