The year without a summer: 1816

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The year 1816: "year without a summer", "poverty year", "eighteen hundred and froze to death". Due to April 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora. There was an immediate impact on world weather and on Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo two months later (abnormal wet weather making it hard to maneuver troops in battle).

April 24: 74 degrees. 30 hours later 21 degrees.
June 6: 6 inches of snow, 18 inches of snow on the ground in Cabot, VT.
June: Temperatures from 101 degrees to 30 degrees.
August: Hard frost in NH.

Many events thereafter, such as songs and books, reflected some of those experiences.

There were major food shortages in the northern hemisphere. New England:

On June 18, 1815, Napoleon was defeated in the Battle of Waterloo, in part due to wet and muddy conditions on the battlefield which hindered his traditional mobility.

A few months earlier, on April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted, one of the largest eruptions known, apparently causing May and June in Europe to be much more wet than usual.

A more recent much smaller eruption was Mt. St. Helen's in May of 1980.

How often have you heard Mt. St. Helen's eruption mentioned in the news? It was not for several years that the summer cold was associated with the eruption in 1815 of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies, which was preceded in 1814 by the eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.

The earth had been cooling for centuries in what today is known as the "Little Ice Age". It is only in recent times that the earth has begun warning to temperatures still far from the warm times in, say, 800 A.D. when Greenland was actually green.

Ephesus harbor silted up about the 6th century. Did it?