Mount Tambora Slidecast

Hey guys, I just wanted to share with you the culmination of my studies for this class. This was a really fun project to do and Mount Tambora was an even more fun subject to learn about. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it. Cheers.

Super Spooky Tambora Story

Hello and welcome back to Dan’s 3CH3 blog! Today, during our last lecture, Professor Egen asked us what we lived in this class. Well, one of the things on that list was that every catastrophe has a natural service function. Obviously, Mount Tambora’s natural service function was releasing pressure in it’s caldera but, what if there is something else were missing? I have my doubts that Mount Tambora is able to appreciate the finer things in life but, it should did create a fair amount of culture in the world. One cultural result of Mount Tambora is the famous poem Darkness by Lord Byron. While staying in his home in Geneva with other writers, Lord Byron proposed a writing contest to pass the time! Lord Byron was inspired by the darkness and gloomy weather that came with the year without a summer to write his poem. This poor weather resulted in one of the most iconic poems of the 19th century. Another writer living with Lord Byron during the year without summer was Mary Shelley. During these writing contests at Lord Byron’s home, Mary Shelley wrote her now very famous book, Frankenstein. Shelley was inspired by the cold and dark weather in Switzerland all summer. Over the course of a few days Shelley, was inspired enough to write of the most iconic literary endeavours of all time.

Cholera – Its the Worst

Welcome back to Dan’s 3CH3 blog! Today I’m going to be talking about somethings really, really, REALLY, not cool. As you may have inferred from my title, today we will be talking about the disease cholera and how its the absolute worst. I’m not sure how familiar you are with cholera, but it is a disease that attacks the small intestine. some symptoms include, diarrhea, vomiting, cramps, and dehydration. Cholera is a disease, usually spread through drinking dirty water and let me tell you, there was A LOT of dirty water during 1816. The Mount Tambora eruption resulted in the perfect conditions to spread the disease. This resulted in the world’s first pandemic (not something to be proud of). Cholera originated in Bengal India but spread worldwide quickly. This can mainly be attributed to lack of knowledge about the spread of disease. People didn’t know that being around other people with disease wouldn’t help them (shocking right?). Most people who had cholera went to major cities to receive better treatment but all they did was advance the spread of the disease. I guess you could say that people should have “Called-era” before they moved to the big city!

The Depressing Origin Story of the Bicycle

Welcome back to Dan’s 3CH3 blog! Today we will be talking about how Mount Tambora helped to invent the bicycle. To be clear, when I say that Mount Tambora helped invent the bicycle, I don’t mean that Mount Tambora was part of the engineering process or in the R&D room of Karl Drais. What I mean is that, out of pure necessity created by Mount Tambora, Karl Drais was able to invent the walking machine which is the precursor to the modern bicycle! During the year without a summer, hard choices were about as common as right-handed people. One big decision people had to make was between feeding themselves, or feeding their horses. Because of widespread crop failure, most people could not afford to feed both themselves and their horses so the most logical solution was to begin eating their horses. Well, once the big horse feast was over, everyone was sitting around without an efficient means of travels.

Enter: Karl Drais. Drais took it upon himself to build a machine that could make travel as quick an efficient as horse powered buggy. Drais’ walking machine is the precursor to the modern bicycle and was capable of reaching speeds of about 5mph. Without Mount Tambora we may not have the Tour De France.

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Global Temperature Map Video

Hey guys! Welcome back to Dan’s 3CH3 blog! Today I just wanted to share with you a video of global temperatures in the year following the Mount Tambora eruption. It is a very good visual representation of the affects of this massive eruption.

Christmas in July

Hello and welcome back to Dan’s 3CH3 blog! Today we will be talking about just why did they call it the year without a summer? I think the best explanation for this nickname is another nickname. Another name for the year of 1816 was “Eighteen-hundred and froze to death”.  It was a VERY cold year for the world. One place that got hit especially hard was New England. On June 6th, 1816 Boston was hit with 6″ of snow. I know we live in Canada but that is ridiculous even by Canuck standards. The weather wasn’t just cold either, it was unpredictable (well, it was predictable in the sense that it was almost always awful).  On April 24th 2016 it was over 20 degrees Celsius, a rather nice day for the April. The very next day on April 25th, the temperature had dropped to -6 degrees Celsius. States north of Virginia were hit with frost every month of the year in 1816. I would say that if any year in the history books deserved to be called “A Year Without Summer”, 1816 gets my vote.samp3c29e3bc43702e60.jpg

 

Hunger Bread

Welcome back to Dan’s 3CH3 blog! Today we are going to be talking about the effects of the crop shortages and how it directly affected the people of Switzerland’s shopping habits! Because of short supply of food, barley anyone could afford to eat. The price of food because ridiculous so, government intervention was needed. The Swiss government did the only reasonable thing a country would during a time like this, print as much money as possible like it was going out of style. Any high school economics student would be able to tell you that this is not the correct thing to do. The money became less valuable than the paper it was printed on.  This resulted in a well known economic side effect called, hyperinflation. In Switzerland, the purchasing power of consumers dropped to the point where they could barely afford food. All throughout Switzerland, people were reduced to buying “hunger bread” which is basically anything that resembles food mixed with flour. To add insult to injury, these hunger breads were extremely high priced and almost inedible. So, for any of you economic students who frequent my blog, if you ever become the Minister of Fiance for a country, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT print more money to solve your problems. It doesn’t work.

Primary Source Analysis – Thomas Jefferson and the Tobacco Crop

When looking for primary sources for Mount Tambora, one thing is evident, they are few and far between. Some of the most reliable information I was able to find from the year without a summer were weather diaries written by Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson had finished his second term as President of the United States a few years before the year with no summer and had begun to record weather on a daily basis from his estate, Monticello. On May 17th, 1816 he pointed out it had been a dry and cold spring. He had also noticed that the seasonal average was about 10 degrees lower than normal during the month of May. He also commented on the fact that this would be a poor growing season for wheat and tobacco. This could have been a deciding factor in the reason that after 1815, cotton was the main cash crop in the United States instead of tobacco. It is very particular that a man as smart as Thomas Jefferson at the time could not piece together the relationship between this poor weather and the volcanic activity. That being said, it is not like any other scientists at the time were able to do that.

Another diary entry during September of the same year had more insight into the pitiful climate of 1816. Thomas Jefferson noted that every state north of Virginia had had frost in every month of the year. He did concede that, with the exception of June and July, Virginia also experienced frost in every month. Thomas Jefferson once again mentions the failure of the tobacco crops in this diary entry. He mentions that the quality of the crop would be about 1/3rd the quality of what they are used to. I think this is further supporting evidence that Mount Tambora may have attributed to the switch from tobacco to cotton as the number crop in America. The link to the diary posts from Thomas Jefferson is posted below.

https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/eruption-mount-tambora