40 Fun Facts About Mount Tambora

What nickname did 1816 earn after Mount Tambora's ash and gases chilled Europe and North America?

Year Without a Summer described the second-coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere since about 1400. Average global temperatures fell by roughly half a degree Celsius, enough to wreck harvests.

Which Gothic novel grew from a ghost-story contest in the stormy summer after Mount Tambora erupted?

Frankenstein took shape when incessant rain kept the 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her friends inside a villa near Geneva for days in June 1816.

Which invention is linked to Mount Tambora, after failed 1816 harvests left Europe's horses unfed?

The bicycle descends from the two-wheeled running machine Karl Drais built in 1817, possibly because oats had become too scarce to keep horses fed.

Heard 2,600 km away on Sumatra, Mount Tambora's 1815 explosions were first mistaken for what?

Gunfire was the first guess on Sumatra, and later analysis suggests the blasts may have carried more than 3,350 km to Thailand and Laos.

By one leading estimate, what killed most of Mount Tambora's victims in 1815 and the months after?

Starvation and epidemics took about 49,000 lives, against roughly 11,000 lost to the eruption itself, because ash burned and smothered the region's crops.

Volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson nicknamed a village buried by Mount Tambora after which ancient city?

Pompeii of the East was his name for the site, where a 2004 dig found the remains of two adults inside a buried house beside bronze bowls and ceramic pots.

Mount Tambora's 1815 blast released four to ten times the energy of which 1883 Indonesian eruption?

Krakatoa killed about 36,000 people in 1883, around half of the toll of at least 71,000 that Tambora is estimated to have taken.

What unseasonal weather hit Albany, New York, on 6 June 1816, a year after Mount Tambora erupted?

A snowfall in June was only the start: near Quebec City it lay 30 cm deep by 10 June, and the cold went on ruining crops across North America for three months.

Which retired US president fell deeper into debt after Mount Tambora's chill ruined his Virginia crops?

Thomas Jefferson saw the harvest fail at Monticello in a year when one Virginia newspaper reported corn crops running one half to two-thirds short.

On which Indonesian island does Mount Tambora stand, forming its own peninsula on the north coast?

Sumbawa still has Tambora as its highest point, even though the 1815 eruption cut the summit's height by about a third.

Mount Tambora is which class of volcano, the same explosive type as Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens?

Stratovolcano cones are built from alternating layers of hardened lava and tephra, and Tambora's once stood about 4,300 metres tall, among the highest peaks in Indonesia.

Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption column rose more than 43 km, reaching which layer of the atmosphere?

Stratosphere winds then carried the finest particles around the globe, where they stayed aloft for months to years and gave London weeks of brilliantly coloured sunsets.

Which element, blasted sky-high by Mount Tambora, formed the haze that dimmed the Sun in 1816?

Sulfur, between 10 and 120 million tons of it by different estimates, spread as a fine aerosol veil that contemporaries described as a dry fog.

Europe's hunger after Mount Tambora was worsened by its slow recovery from which long conflict?

The Napoleonic Wars had only just ended, and the food riots of 1816 and 1817 became the most violent unrest on the continent since the French Revolution.

Which painter of Chichester Canal may owe his glowing skies to Mount Tambora's lingering ash?

J. M. W. Turner worked through the hazy years after 1815, and a 2007 study of four centuries of paintings found artists used more red after major eruptions.

Which Romantic poet wrote the apocalyptic poem Darkness in 1816, under Mount Tambora's dimmed skies?

Lord Byron was moved by a single day so dim that hens went to roost at noon and candles had to be lit as though it were midnight.

Mount Tambora's 1815 explosions were heard 1,260 km away in Batavia, the old name of which city?

Jakarta, on the island of Java, even caught a nitrous smell in the air as Tambora's ash veil spread westward.

Which governor of Java, later Singapore's founder, left key notes on Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption?

Stamford Raffles left notes that, with one later traveller's report, are the two primary sources behind a leading modern estimate of the death toll.

Which volcanic rock from Mount Tambora formed floating rafts up to five kilometres across in 1815?

Pumice mixed with uprooted trees drifted so far that two British ships met rafts of it about 3,600 km west of the volcano that October.

Mount Tambora's dry fog dimmed the 1816 Sun so much that which solar features showed to the naked eye?

Sunspots showed through a haze over the north-eastern United States that reddened the daylight and that neither wind nor rain could disperse.

Crop failures tied to Mount Tambora drove which future religious founder's family from Vermont to New York?

Joseph Smith was a boy when his family left Norwich, Vermont, for Palmyra, the town where his Book of Mormon was first published in 1830.

Which disease spread from Bengal as far as Moscow after Mount Tambora's fallout delayed India's monsoon?

Cholera spread out from a region near the Ganges once the delayed monsoon finally broke in late, torrential rains.

Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption was at least ten times larger than which Philippine volcano's 1991 blast?

Pinatubo cooled parts of the United States through 1992, yet Tambora dwarfed it: Tambora rates 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, Pinatubo 6.

Mount Tambora exists because which tectonic plate slides beneath Indonesia at about 7.8 cm a year?

Australian Plate rock descends northward under the islands, and Tambora sits roughly 180 km above the upper surface of that sinking slab.

Mount Tambora erupted near the end of which cold spell that began in the 14th century?

The Little Ice Age had already strained Europe's farms for generations, so Tambora's cooling landed on harvests that were weak to begin with.

Which natural archive preserves Mount Tambora's 1815 fallout as a sharp chemical spike in a dated layer?

Ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica hold the 1815 layer, and scientists measure it to estimate how much gas Tambora released.

Which neighbouring island, home to Mount Rinjani, also lost thousands of lives after Mount Tambora erupted?

Lombok lies just west of Tambora's own island, and an 1855 tally put its deaths at about 10,000.

Which US state joined the Union in December 1816 as New Englanders fled west from Mount Tambora's cold?

Indiana gained statehood as thousands left New England, and Vermont alone lost 10,000 to 15,000 people, wiping out seven years of population growth.

In which country did an ice dam formed in the cold after Mount Tambora burst with deadly force in 1818?

Switzerland's Giétro Glacier dammed a valley into a growing lake, which burst out despite an engineer's efforts to drain it.

In local folklore, Mount Tambora erupted as punishment after a ruler fed which meat to a Muslim pilgrim?

Dog meat served to a hajji, whom the ruler then killed, is the offence named in a poem about the disaster written around 1830.

The lost Tambora language surprised linguists by falling outside which family dominant across Indonesia?

Austronesian words turn up in a word list collected before the eruption only as a few loans, so the language may have been an isolate or a far-western relative of the Papuan tongues.

Heinrich Zollinger, first to climb Mount Tambora after the 1815 eruption, was what kind of scientist?

Botanist Zollinger came in 1847 to see how plant life had recovered, and found trees regrowing on the lower slopes while smoke still covered the summit.

Which technology helped a 2004 Tambora dig locate a house buried beneath three metres of ash?

Ground-penetrating radar pinpointed the house about 25 km west of the caldera, where tests showed the objects inside had been carbonised by the heat.

Which crop, sold under the volcano's own name, grows on plantations on Mount Tambora's slopes?

Coffee has been planted at Pekat village since the 1930s, on slopes where resettlement only began in 1907, nearly a century after the eruption.

What protected status did Mount Tambora gain in 2015, two hundred years after the great eruption?

National park status followed decades of pressure: a logging company arrived in 1972 with a concession over a quarter of the mountain's rainforest.

Which German chemist, a child during the famine after Mount Tambora, later introduced mineral fertilisers?

Justus von Liebig grew up in Darmstadt during the hunger years and went on to study how plants feed.

Mount Tambora erupted during which spell of low solar activity, lasting from about 1790 to 1830?

Dalton Minimum years overlapped the eruption, though whether a quieter Sun added to the cooling is still not known.

Mount Tambora's island belongs to which Indonesian chain stretching east from Bali towards Timor?

Lesser Sunda Islands come in two rows: the northern one, which holds Tambora, is volcanic, while southern islands such as Timor are not.

Pitch darkness covered places as far as 600 km from Mount Tambora in April 1815 for up to how long?

Two days of darkness reached 600 km out, and ash was recorded falling at least 1,300 km from the summit.

Which fragrant wood, used for incense and medicine, was a famed export of Mount Tambora's island?

Sandalwood was traded alongside honey, horses and sappan wood for red dye, and bronzeware found at the buried village suggests the trade paid well.