The Year Without a Summer (also known as the Poverty Year, The Summer that Never Was, Year There Was No Summer and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death) was the year 1816, in which severe summer climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F), resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. It is believed that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.
Historian John D. Post has called this "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world".
Read more about Year Without A Summer: Description, Causes, Effects, Comparable Events
Famous quotes containing the words year and/or summer:
“You can feel it, in a hundred little ways year after year. It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)