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Epic eruption changed the world
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WHILE Shanghai has seen an unusually cool summer this year, some Chinese provinces have experienced unusual heat and drought. Parts of Henan and Hubei provinces have suffered drought unseen in 60 years.
Some blame the unusual weather on the recently used middle section of the South-North Water-Diversion Project.
An article in People’s Daily on August 25 flatly rejected the charge as groundless. But the blame is not the first of its kind. Professor Liu Shukun, general engineer from the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, questioned the project in 2010 when China’s southwest was hit by a drought that occurs less than once every century.
Among others, the People’s Daily article asserted that the water diverted in the middle section of the diversion project is sourced from Danjiangkou Reservoir, which lies between Hubei and Henan provinces, while the drought-stricken areas in Henan do not fall within the same drainage area as the reservoir. This, the article alleged, rules out the possibility of any link between the project and the drought.
After reading Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s “Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World,” I am under the impression that our planet is probably more connected than we have realized. Wood is professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities.
According to Wood, when Mount Tambora, located on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, blew up with apocalyptic force in April 1815, no one linked that single, barely reported geological event with the cascading worldwide weather disasters in its three-year wake. During the Cold War period, when instruments were available for measuring nuclear fallout, scientists began to study volcanic residues in the atmosphere.
It was then concluded that the sun-blocking dust veil of a major eruption can linger above the Earth for up to three years, slightly lowering the temperature, which is sufficient to trigger disasters of epic proportions.
Although until recently, people have been oblivious to the volcanic effect on their fate, Wood manages to document the link by marshaling a host of evidence, over the period from the eruption to ensuing years when its effects were felt.
Global misery
In that fatal year of 1815, Tambora shot its contents skyward into the stratosphere with such force that it was said to have led to a death toll of over 100,000, the largest in history from a volcano.
Across a 600-kilometer radius, darkness descended for two days, while the gases spewed with such force that they reached a height that might seriously interfere with the climate — globally.
In New England, 1816 was known as the “Year without a Summer,” and it was when the English pulled up their vineyards and took to skating on the Thames.
Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” The year 1816 remains the coldest, wettest Geneva summer since records began in 1753, with 130 days of rain between April and September, swelling the waters of Lake Geneva and flooding the city.
In China, even tropical Hainan Island saw snow in the summer of 1815 and experienced a severe winter in which more than half the forests perished. In Shanxi, summer frosts in 1817 led to mass emigration from the province. The hardest-hit was Yunnan, where famished corpses lay unmourned on the roads, and the peasants sucked white clay.
For people depending on subsistence agriculture, crop failures meant swarms of people roaming the countries begging for alms.
The paper trail of impressions left by Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) and her literary coterie also hint at the impacts of Tambora.
Wood does not present this eruption as a case of crude environmentalism but as a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.
A 2008 modeling study concluded Tambora’s eruption had by far the largest impact on global mean surface temperature among volcanic events since 1610, contributing to an overall decline of global average temperatures of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit across an entire decade.
Ironically, the knowledge of this terrible effect does not humble human beings.
There have since been a flurry of scientific papers suggesting the possibility of imitating the cooling impact of volcanic eruptions by artificially injecting massive volumes of sulfate aerosols into the air to counter global warming.
Every page of Wood’s book shows evidence for the extraordinary folly of the idea.
“... for a technology-rich civilization addicted to photoshop realities and spectacular special effects — and little versed in the teleconnections of climate and human society — a supersized artificial volcano blast might make for an appropriate climax ... or finale. But in such cynical reflections, as King Lear warns us, ‘Madness lies’.”
As the author points out succinctly, volcanic eruptions are unpredictable, while “human carbon emissions remain on an inexorable upward trajectory.”
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