Mount Tambora
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40 free Mount Tambora trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In April 1815 a mountain in Indonesia blew itself apart in the most powerful eruption in recorded history. Mount Tambora lost roughly a third of its height in a matter of days, and the effects travelled much further than the ash: harvests failed on the other side of the planet, and the gloom left its mark on art, literature and even transport. This quiz gathers the best fun facts about Mount Tambora. It covers the eruption itself and how far away it was heard, the science of how one volcano cooled a hemisphere, the people and the lost language at its foot, and the strange chain of consequences that followed across Europe, Asia and North America. It is written for curious players rather than geologists. If you enjoy volcanoes, wild weather or history's odd cause-and-effect stories, expect to learn something new in every round.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What nickname did 1816 earn after Mount Tambora's ash and gases chilled Europe and North America?
Year Without a Summer
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.
Q 02Which Gothic novel grew from a ghost-story contest in the stormy summer after Mount Tambora erupted?
Frankenstein
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.
Q 03Which invention is linked to Mount Tambora, after failed 1816 harvests left Europe's horses unfed?
The bicycle
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.
Q 04Heard 2,600 km away on Sumatra, Mount Tambora's 1815 explosions were first mistaken for what?
Gunfire
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.
Q 05By one leading estimate, what killed most of Mount Tambora's victims in 1815 and the months after?
Starvation and epidemics
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.
Q 06Volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson nicknamed a village buried by Mount Tambora after which ancient city?
Pompeii
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.
Q 07Mount Tambora's 1815 blast released four to ten times the energy of which 1883 Indonesian eruption?
Krakatoa
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.
Q 08What unseasonal weather hit Albany, New York, on 6 June 1816, a year after Mount Tambora erupted?
A snowfall
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.
Q 09Which retired US president fell deeper into debt after Mount Tambora's chill ruined his Virginia crops?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 10On which Indonesian island does Mount Tambora stand, forming its own peninsula on the north coast?
Sumbawa
Sumbawa still has Tambora as its highest point, even though the 1815 eruption cut the summit's height by about a third.
Q 11Mount Tambora is which class of volcano, the same explosive type as Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens?
Stratovolcano
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.
Q 12Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption column rose more than 43 km, reaching which layer of the atmosphere?
Stratosphere
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.
Q 13Which element, blasted sky-high by Mount Tambora, formed the haze that dimmed the Sun in 1816?
Sulfur
Q 21Crop failures tied to Mount Tambora drove which future religious founder's family from Vermont to New York?
Joseph Smith
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.
Q 22Which disease spread from Bengal as far as Moscow after Mount Tambora's fallout delayed India's monsoon?
Cholera
Cholera spread out from a region near the Ganges once the delayed monsoon finally broke in late, torrential rains.
Q 23Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption was at least ten times larger than which Philippine volcano's 1991 blast?
Pinatubo
Pinatubo cooled parts of the United States through 1992, yet Tambora dwarfed it: Tambora rates 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, Pinatubo 6.
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.
Q 14Europe's hunger after Mount Tambora was worsened by its slow recovery from which long conflict?
The Napoleonic Wars
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.
Q 15Which painter of Chichester Canal may owe his glowing skies to Mount Tambora's lingering ash?
J. M. W. Turner
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.
Q 16Which Romantic poet wrote the apocalyptic poem Darkness in 1816, under Mount Tambora's dimmed skies?
Lord Byron
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.
Q 17Mount Tambora's 1815 explosions were heard 1,260 km away in Batavia, the old name of which city?
Jakarta
Jakarta, on the island of Java, even caught a nitrous smell in the air as Tambora's ash veil spread westward.
Q 18Which governor of Java, later Singapore's founder, left key notes on Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption?
Stamford Raffles
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.
Q 19Which volcanic rock from Mount Tambora formed floating rafts up to five kilometres across in 1815?
Pumice
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.
Q 20Mount Tambora's dry fog dimmed the 1816 Sun so much that which solar features showed to the naked eye?
Sunspots
Sunspots showed through a haze over the north-eastern United States that reddened the daylight and that neither wind nor rain could disperse.
Q 24Mount Tambora exists because which tectonic plate slides beneath Indonesia at about 7.8 cm a year?
Australian
Australian Plate rock descends northward under the islands, and Tambora sits roughly 180 km above the upper surface of that sinking slab.
Q 25Mount Tambora erupted near the end of which cold spell that began in the 14th century?
The Little Ice Age
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.
Q 26Which natural archive preserves Mount Tambora's 1815 fallout as a sharp chemical spike in a dated layer?
Ice cores
Ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica hold the 1815 layer, and scientists measure it to estimate how much gas Tambora released.
Q 27Which neighbouring island, home to Mount Rinjani, also lost thousands of lives after Mount Tambora erupted?
Lombok
Lombok lies just west of Tambora's own island, and an 1855 tally put its deaths at about 10,000.
Q 28Which US state joined the Union in December 1816 as New Englanders fled west from Mount Tambora's cold?
Indiana
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.
Q 29In which country did an ice dam formed in the cold after Mount Tambora burst with deadly force in 1818?
Switzerland
Switzerland's Giétro Glacier dammed a valley into a growing lake, which burst out despite an engineer's efforts to drain it.
Q 30In local folklore, Mount Tambora erupted as punishment after a ruler fed which meat to a Muslim pilgrim?
Dog
Dog meat served to a hajji, whom the ruler then killed, is the offence named in a poem about the disaster written around 1830.