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".
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Famous quotes containing the words year without, year and/or summer:
“Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)
“We are finding out that what looked like a neglected house a year ago is in fact a ruin.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“‘Twas a balmy summer evening, and a goodly crowd was there.
Which well-nigh filled Joe’s barroom on the corner of the square,”
—Hugh Antoine D’Arcy (1843–1925)