On May 18, 1980, after a series of earthquakes, an eruption column rose 80,000 feet into the atmosphere depositing ash into 11 neighboring states. The hot mix of lava and pulverized rock also caused snow, ice and glaciers on the volcano to melt, creating volcanic mudslides. Stunning image.
Volcanic ash filled the skies in Washington and nearby states for days, seen here over the airport in Ephrata, Wash. on May 19, 1980. The ash blotted out the sun and fell like snow, drifting as high as two feet. It crushed crops, caused schools and businesses to close, and halted nearly all transportation, stranding thousands of motorists. Another stunning image, like something out of an apocalypse movie.
Thousands of trees were flattened and reduced to nothing but logs in the wake of the devastating eruption. What was once a dense forest is a wasteland as trees were broken at their trunks as easily as blades of grass.
Logs and debris are seen in this photo scattered near the Toutle River at Spirit Lake Road, Washington following the eruption. The eruption caused flash floods and mudslides that moved through logging operations in the area causing extensive damage.
The heat caused nearly all of the mountain’s glaciers and snow to melt, creating massive volcanic mudslides and floods that travelled as fast as 90 miles per hour. The material had the consistency of wet concrete as it raced down nearby creeks and rivers bringing down everything in its path.
Volcanic ash buried many vehicles during and after the eruption. Cars close to the volcano (within 10 kilometers northwest of the summit) were buried under thick volcanic ash.
This photo was taken at 3:00 PM after the eruption and shows how dark the skies were from being covered in ash. Two people walk the abandoned streets of Yakima, Washington as they cover their faces to protect themselves from breathing in the volcanic ash on May 18, 1980.
This 4-way comparison shows the same spot in 1979 to 1995. Back in 1979, the area surrounding Mount St. Helens was a dense forest popular for logging. A year after the eruption (bottom left), the area looked more like a dessert than a forest after all the damaged trees were removed. Even years later, little to no plant life can be seen in the area surrounding Mount St Helens (top and bottom right) as trees completely ceased to grow.
Looking at those photos, the power of nature is truly humbling. Now just imagine a Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. A full eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would be thousands of times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Thousands. Supervolcanoes like Yellowstone reach a level 8 on the VEI scale, whereas Mount St. Helens was a level 5. Each whole number increase on the VEI scale represents a roughly tenfold increase in explosive volume. By the way, the VEI scale (Volcanic Explosivity Index) measures the power of a volcanic eruption. The scale goes up to a maximum value of 8. While theoretically open-ended, a VEI 8 represents a "mega-colossal" supereruption, and no known eruption in Earth's geological history has ever exceeded this category. The last known Yellowstone supervolcano eruption that occurred 631,000 years ago measured a VEI 8 on the scale.
Lake Toba is located in the Barisan Mountains in North Sumatra, Indonesia. It's a popular destination for tourists because of its beauty. Lake Toba is 62 miles long, 19 miles wide, and has a depth of 1,657 feet. But it's no ordinary lake. It's a reminder of the destructive force of nature. 74,000 years ago, a mountain in Sumatra, Indonesia, didn't just erupt. It ceased to exist. The Toba supervolcano had been building pressure for thousands of years. When it was finally released, it did so with a force that is almost impossible to comprehend. In just 9 to 14 days, it ejected 2,800 cubic kilometres of ash, rock and gas into the atmosphere — the largest eruption in the last 2 million years. Five thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. Pyroclastic flows buried the northern Sumatra coast to coast under 600 metres of superheated rock. The entire Indian subcontinent was blanketed in 15 centimetres of ash. The eruption cloud covered 7.5% of the entire surface of the Earth. Then the ground collapsed. The magma chamber beneath had emptied so fast that the roof caved in — creating a depression 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide. Over the thousands of years that followed, rain filled it. Rivers fed it. The most catastrophic event in human history slowly became the most beautiful lake in Southeast Asia. Today, Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake on Earth. Larger than Singapore. And rising from its center is Samosir Island — pushed upward by magma pressure still stirring below — an island inside a lake inside a sleeping supervolcano. The magma chamber beneath Toba still holds 50,000 cubic kilometres of eruptible magma. It is not extinct. It is waiting. You are not looking at three images. You are looking at one place — before, during and after the closest thing to an apocalypse our species has ever witnessed.
The Lake Toba supervolcano eruption was a VEI 8 on the scale, as bad as it gets. It's mind-bending to think that the eruption was so massive that the volcano collapsed in on itself, creating the 100-kilometer-long caldera that forms today's Lake Toba. A supervolcano eruption is responsible for this lake being here, 62 miles long, 19 miles wide, and 1,657 feet deep. That had to be an apocalyptic explosion. The eruption released massive amounts of sulfur dioxide, triggering a global "volcanic winter" that dropped global average temperatures by 3°C to 5°C (5.4°F to 9°F) for several years. In higher latitudes, temperatures plummeted by as much as 15°C (27°F), a devastating change in temperature for plant and animal life.
Mount Toba: Did a Supervolcano Almost Wipe Out the Human Species?
The eruption of the Toba supervolcano, according to theory, plunged the world into an apocalypse, almost wiping out the entire human species.
Published: Jan 20, 2024
written by Greg Beyer, BA History & Linguistics, Journalism Diploma
Seventy-four thousand years ago, the Earth suffered a catastrophic event which, according to the Toba catastrophe theory, led to the extinction of many animals around the globe.
Ash covered the land. The sky was blanketed in darkness. Temperatures plummeted. Plants refused to grow. The few surviving human beings huddled together for warmth as the apocalyptic nightmare dragged on.
Seventy-four thousand years ago, the supervolcano Mount Toba on what is now Sumatra exploded. It was an extinction event that changed the world, and according to some academics, it almost wiped out the human species.
The Toba Catastrophe Theory
volcano eruption volumes
Comparison of volcanic eruption in terms of ejected material. Source: Public Domain via US Geological Survey
Compared with other animal species, there is a surprising lack of genetic diversity among humans. In fact, there is less genetic diversity between all eight billion of us than there is in a closely related troop of 50 chimpanzees. The reason for this was a mystery for many years until theories were put forward to explain the phenomenon.
The Toba catastrophe theory and the human bottleneck hypothesis posit that around 74,000 years ago, the human species almost went extinct. It resulted from a global catastrophe caused by the eruption of Mount Toba, the remains of which lie on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Climate models suggested that the average world temperature dropped by as much as 15 degrees Celsius in the wake of the eruption.
Genetic data contributed to the theory and suggested that the human species went through a genetic bottleneck – a severe reduction in the total gene pool – suggesting that the species was greatly reduced. Some academics posited that the species was reduced to a few thousand individuals with as few as 1,000 mating pairs in total. This would explain why there is so little genetic diversity among our species.
The theory posits that we survived in small groups scattered in various parts of Africa before repopulating.
Once widely accepted, however, this theory has come under renewed scrutiny over the past few years as evidence paints a more confusing picture as to how humanity coped.
The Eruption Data
Map showing the discovery of tephra (volcanic rock ejection) from the Toba supervolcano. Source: Erich Fisher/Phys.org
The explosivity index on which volcanoes are rated is called the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Like the Richter scale, which measures the power of earthquakes, each number increase represents a factor increase in 10. So, a VEI number of 5, for example, is ten times more powerful than a VEI number of 4.
The VEI number for Toba is estimated to be 8, the highest on the scale. For reference, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens measured 5. Toba was 1,000 times more powerful than Mount Saint Helens and 100 times more powerful than the Krakatoa eruption, which clocked in at VEI 6. Krakatoa was so powerful the sound of the blast curled the Earth four times!
In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora, measuring a 7 on the VEI scale, spewed so much ash into the air that 1816 was known as “the year without a summer.” Crops failed the world over, and it snowed in Virginia on July 4! Toba was more powerful than Tambora by a factor of 10.
As Toba exploded, those in the immediate surroundings would have had no chance of survival. Pyroclastic flow billowed from the site, superheated to 1100 degrees Celsius and traveled at 320 kilometers per hour. Anybody who came in contact with it would have died instantly.
Studies show that the total amount of dense-rock equivalent (DRE), the scientific term used when measuring volcanic ejection mass, was between 2,800 km3 (670 cu mi) and 6,000 km3 (1,400 cu mi). All of this tephra (or DRE) was ejected in the space of 9 to 14 days.
This completely dwarfs all volcanic eruptions in history, making the eruptions of Vesuvius and Mount Saint Helens seem tiny and insignificant by comparison.
How the Climate Changed
A handful of ash from India from a layer of earth dated to 74,000 years ago. Source: Indian Express
The exact effects of the eruption are difficult to determine through studying the sedimentary layer. However, there seems to have been a shift in climate that may or may not have been caused by the eruption. It is likely that a climate shift was already taking place and was accelerated by the Toba eruption. Temperatures dropped or were dropping significantly, ushering in the start of an ice age that forced many species to adapt.
If Toba were not directly responsible for the Ice Age, it would certainly have contributed to speeding it up.
What Could the Apocalypse Have Been Like?
A comparison of eruption sizes measured in ejected material. Source: Robert Krulwich/NPR
Many of the people who lived in Sumatra would have been killed in the initial few days of the explosion. Those unlucky enough to survive the first few days would have had a more drawn-out death as ash whipped through the air and covered the ground in several feet of its toxic mass. In India, 5,000 kilometers (3100 miles) away, six inches of ash covered the ground, and even further away, ash deposits from the Toba eruption have been found in Africa near Lake Malawi as well as on the southern coast of South Africa, 8,900 kilometers (5,530 miles) away.
While the ash may have looked light and fluffy like snow, the truth is that volcanic ash is heavy. It’s thick and toxic. Fine dust breathed in forms cement-like quality in the lungs; those who inhaled the ash would have suffocated, some in lingering torture. It also fell over all the water sources, turning rivers into slushy, ash-filled mud.
If the eruption of Tambora blanketed the sun and turned the entire following year into a miserable winter, Mount Toba would have been exponentially worse, with some academics positing the volcanic winter could have lasted hundreds of years. If this were the case, there would have certainly been an era of darkness and cold, which would have wiped out many plant and animal species and driven many others, including humans, to the brink of extinction.
If there were a mass die-off of plants and animals, humans would have struggled to survive.
Controversies & Arguments
Lake Toba on the Island of Sumatra – the remains of the Toba supervolcano. Source: Google Earth
Of course, the theory of the catastrophic Toba eruption causing a human bottleneck is debated by academics. Widely accepted during the 1990s and 2000s, the theory has come under intense scrutiny as more discoveries are made pertaining to the event.
What is accepted as fact is that Mount Toba erupted with a power and force that no human being had ever witnessed before. What is debated is how it affects the human species.
The bottleneck theory posits that the volcanic winter lasted as long as ten years and would have caused a mass die-off of plants, leading to mass starvation as food sources dwindled. Evidence also suggests that other animals were affected or coincidentally recovered from drastically reduced populations around this time. The East African chimpanzee, the Bornean orangutan, the central Indian macaque, the tiger, and the cheetah all show signs of having recovered from a bottleneck.
Homo floresiensis survived for around 20,000 years after the eruption of Mount Toba. Source: Flickr user Karen Neoh via Smithsonian Magazine
A 2021 study concluded that, according to the assumed amount of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere, the temperature drop would have been −3.5 °C (−6.3 °F), and temperatures would have returned to normal within five years of the Toba eruption. This disrupts the theory that a mass die-off of plants around the tropical regions happened.
What is also significant is the survival of other human species. Neanderthals were around until around 35,000 years ago, and the region in which they lived was already frigid. Further temperature drops would have made life far more difficult. But perhaps what’s most intriguing is that current theories suggest Homo floresiensis survived for at least 20,000 years after the eruption of Mount Toba. They lived just 2,600 kilometers (1600 miles) away on the Island of Flores.
The locations of Mount Toba and the Jurreru Valley, 2,600 kilometers (1,615 miles) apart. Source: Image created by author via Google Earth
Controversy also surrounds human survival on the Asian subcontinent, where significant amounts of ash blanketed the ground. India was directly in the path of the ash cloud and was one of the first substantial landmasses to be affected by the fallout. Opponents of the Toba catastrophe theory point out that there is evidence of abundant habitation in the Jurreru Valley directly before and after the eruption. Proponents of the theory, however, point out that other sites in India, such as the Middle Son Valley to the north of India, show a major population decline. They argue that people survived in the Jurreru Valley and sought refuge there as it was fed by springs – an uncontaminated supply of fresh water.
Similarly, evidence of thriving human populations on the southern coast of Africa may prove that humans weren’t as severely affected as previously thought or that this area may have constituted an area of refuge that was less affected than others.
Lake Toba today is an idyllic place that hides a catastrophic past. Source: Robert Harding Picture Library/National Geographic
While some evidence points to the idea that the human species almost went extinct, especially evidence regarding genetics, deep core samples, and climatic models could suggest otherwise. With what we know now, it is difficult to state anything as fact.
Whatever the case, however, Mount Toba’s eruption is the single greatest volcanic explosion ever experienced by humanity, and studying its effects could help us deal with the potential of another event of similar proportions.
What we do know for sure is that there are supervolcanoes that could blow their top without any warning. Whenever that happens, whether tomorrow or a hundred thousand years from now, it will be an extremely dark and terrifying day in human history.
The Toba supervolcano eruption was 5,000 times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption. Just think about that. In boxing terms, it had humanity on the ropes.
The pyroclastic flow from the Toba super-eruption would have been approximately 1,100 °C (2,012 °F) and there would have been a lot of it. Anything within hundreds of kilometers of the Lake Toba vent in northern Sumatra was completely wiped out, buried under massive layers of hot, concrete-like volcanic rock and ash.
Another volcano eruption that impacted the world on a massive scale was the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest recorded volcano eruption in human history. The eruption is referred to as the "Year Without a Summer" because the massive explosion injected millions of tons of ash, sulfur dioxide, and aerosols into the stratosphere, forming a global shield that blocked sunlight and triggered a severe volcanic winter in 1816. In April 1815, Mount Tambora located on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia erupted in one of the most powerful volcanic events in recorded history (Volcanic Explosivity Index of 7). Lighter sulfur gases and ash particles rose high into the stratosphere, circling the globe and reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. The reduced sunlight caused global average temperatures to drop by roughly 1.5°F to 5.4°F (1°C to 3°C), chilling the Northern Hemisphere. Regions across North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia experienced freezing temperatures, heavy June snowstorms (including up to a foot of snow in New England), and killing mid-summer frosts in July and August. The cold weather and lack of sunlight destroyed crops and killed livestock, leading to widespread food shortages, soaring grain prices, and famine across Europe and North America. The gloomy, dark weather trapped people indoors—inspiring Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein—and triggered mass migrations as desperate farmers moved westward across the United States. The eruption literally caused a year without a summer. This is actually a book about the eruption and Mary Shelley penning Frankenstein.
Great article written by the New York Times 200 years after the Tambora volcano eruption of 1815, the "Year Without a Summer" eruption.
A Volcanic Eruption That Reverberates 200 Years Later
The deep volcanic crater, top, was produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 - the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history.Credit...Iwan Setiyawan/KOMPAS, via Associated Press
By: William J. Broad
Aug. 24, 2015
In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters.
Around the lush isles of the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — the eruption of Mount Tambora killed tens of thousands of people. They were burned alive or killed by flying rocks, or they died later of starvation because the heavy ash smothered crops.
More surprising, investigators have found that the giant cloud of minuscule particles spread around the globe, blocked sunlight and produced three years of planetary cooling. In June 1816, a blizzard pummeled upstate New York. That July and August, killer frosts in New England ravaged farms. Hailstones pounded London all summer.
A recent history of the disaster, “Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World,” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, shows planetary effects so extreme that many nations and communities sustained waves of famine, disease, civil unrest and economic decline. Crops failed globally.
“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have loomed large in art and literature ever since.
“The paper trail,” said Dr. Wood, a University of Illinois professor of English, “goes back again and again to Tambora.”
The Mount Tambora eruption's profound aftermath influenced the skies of 19th-century paintings like “Chichester Canal,” above, by J.M.W. Turner.Credit...Tate, London 2015
The gargantuan blast — 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens’s — and its ensuing worldwide pall have been the subject of increasing study over the years as scientists have sought to comprehend not only the planet’s climatological past but the future likelihood of such global disasters.
Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, who has studied the Tambora catastrophe, put the chance of a similar explosion in the next half-century as relatively low — perhaps 10 percent. But the consequences, he added, could run extraordinarily high.
“The modern world,” Dr. Oppenheimer said, “is far from immune to the potentially catastrophic impacts.”
Before it exploded, Tambora was the tallest peak in a land of cloudy summits. It lay atop the tropic isle of Sumbawa, its spires rising nearly three miles. Long dormant, the mountain was considered a home to gods. Villages dotted its slopes, and nearby farmers grew rice, coffee and pepper.
On the evening of April 5, 1815, according to contemporary accounts, flames shot from its summit and the earth rumbled for hours. The volcano then fell silent.
Five days later, the peak exploded in a deafening roar of fire, rock and boiling ash that was heard hundreds of miles away. Flaming rivers of molten rock ran down the slopes, destroying tropic forests and villages. Days later, still raging but by then hollow, the mountain collapsed, its height suddenly diminished by a mile.
Locally, an estimated 100,000 people died. Sumbawa never recovered.
The repercussions were global, but no one realized that the widespread death and mayhem arose from an eruption halfway around the world. What emerged was regional folklore. New Englanders called 1816 “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” Germans called 1817 the year of the beggar. These and many other local episodes remained unknown or unconnected.
An early rendering of Frankenstein. In the cold and stormy summer of 1816, while on holiday in Switzerland, Mary Shelley came up with her lurid tale.Credit...The British Library Board
It was scientists who began to stitch together the big picture, especially the peculiar link between fiery volcanism and icy weather. An overarching goal was to separate natural climate fluctuations from those of human origin. One after another, studies came back to New England and its frigid summer of 1816.
Dr. Wood expanded the portrait in his book, which is due out in paperback next month. It draws on hundreds of scientific papers as well as Dr. Wood’s knowledge of 19th-century literature to lay bare three years of planetary mayhem as well as the origins of fictional demons.
“My interest was to understand a global event,” Dr. Wood said in an interview, “and that meant serious detective work in lots of unfamiliar archives.” Five years of inquiry took him to China, Europe and India.
It also transported him to Tambora, where he braved leeches and razor-sharp leaves to peer across its yawning caldera, four miles from rim to rim.
The exploding mountain, the book notes, heaved some 12 cubic miles of earthen matter to a height of more than 25 miles. While coarse particles soon rained out, finer ones traveled the high winds in a spreading cloud. “It passed,” Dr. Wood wrote, “across both south and north poles, leaving a telltale sulfate imprint on the ice for paleoclimatologists to discover more than a century and a half later.”
The global veil, high above rain clouds, reflected much sunlight back into space. So the planet cooled. The pall, Dr. Wood said, also spawned tempests far below.
His book reprints an 1816 oil painting of Weymouth Bay, a sheltered cove on England’s south coast, by John Constable — the sky above churning with dark clouds. “Everywhere,” Dr. Wood said, “the volcanic winds blew hard.” He noted that both history and computer models speak of fierce storms back then.
A harbor scene by Caspar David Friedrich, painted after the Tambora eruption, depicts a vivid sky.Credit...Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.
The particles high in the atmosphere also produced spectacular sunsets, as detailed in the famous paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the English landscape pioneer. His vivid red skies, Dr. Wood remarked, “seem like an advertisement for the future of art.”
The story also comes alive in local dramas, none more important for literary history than the birth of Frankenstein’s monster and the human vampire. That happened on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where some of the most famous names of English poetry had gone on a summer holiday.
By 1816, Switzerland, landlocked and famously rugged, was beginning to reel from the bad weather and failed crops. Starving mobs stormed bakeries after bread prices soared. The book recounts a priest’s distress: “It is terrifying to see these walking skeletons devour the most repulsive foods with such avidity.”
That June, the cold and stormy weather sent the English tourists inside a lakeside villa to warm themselves by a fire and exchange ghost stories. Mary Shelley, then 18, was part of a literary coterie that included Percy Shelley, her future husband, as well as Lord Byron. Wine flowed, as did laudanum, a form of opium. Candles flickered.
In this moody atmosphere, Mary Shelley came up with her lurid tale of Frankenstein, which she published two years later. And Lord Byron hit on the outline of the modern vampire tale, published later by a compatriot as “The Vampyre.” The freakish weather also inspired Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness.”
Dr. Wood’s book documents many other repercussions of the planetary chill, devoting a chapter to a cholera pandemic of 1817 that began in India and globally killed tens of millions of people. Dr. Wood attributes its rise to a deadly combination of monsoonal changes and pounding rains — a main theory of leading cholera detectives.
The pandemic spread and eventually reached the Dutch East Indies. On Java alone it killed an estimated 125,000 people — more, Dr. Wood noted, “than died in the volcanic eruption itself.”
He also profiles the wintry chill in Yunnan Province in southern China, a land of mountains and jungles roamed by tigers and elephants. Rice crops there quickly failed, and famine gnawed deep for years. In July 1816, Dr. Wood noted, the province had “unprecedented snows.”
The poet, Li Yuyang, who was 32 as Tambora began its global rampage, wrote of cold downpours and flash flooding in “A Sigh for Autumn Rain.”
Water spilling from the eaves deafens me.
People rush from falling houses in their thousands
And tens of thousands, for the work of the rain
Is worse than the work of thieves. Bricks crack. Walls fall.
In an instant, the house is gone.
Dr. Wood closes with a portrait of the eastern United States in 1816, focusing first on upstate New York. One day that June, four young classmates walked to school, most barefoot. Then a blizzard struck. Dismissed early, the children ran for their lives as the snow rose to their knees. They succeeded in reaching warm cabins and fires.
For Thomas Jefferson, the pain lasted longer. The retired third president of the United States, at his estate in Virginia, faced a disastrous summer in 1816 because of the remarkably short growing season. The next year was just as bad.
In a letter, Jefferson expressed concern about the possible ruin of his Monticello farm “if the seasons should, against the course of nature hitherto observed, continue constantly hostile to our agriculture.”
The countless victims and occasional beneficiaries of Tambora’s fury were oblivious to the volcanic roots of their circumstances, Dr. Wood noted, making the challenge of writing about it formidable and “occasionally mind-bending.”
More generally, he said, the revelation of global volcanic ruin — a portrait 200 years in the making — offers a kind of meditation on the difficulty of uncovering the subtle effects of climate change, whether its origins lie in nature’s fury or the invisible byproducts of human civilization.
It is, Dr. Wood remarked, “hard to see and no less difficult to imagine.”
Ok, here is a bit of the inside scoop about the "Year Without a Summer" eruption and Mary Shelley creating the legendary Frankenstein. Interestingly, the eruption would also lead to the creation of another classic horror story, Dracula.
The Volcano That Created Frankenstein and Dracula
How did a volcano create Frankenstein and Dracula? In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history. The ash cloud blocked sunlight across the northern hemisphere, turning 1816 into the "Year Without a Summer." That June, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori were trapped indoors at Villa Diodati in Switzerland during the perpetual cold and dark. Byron proposed a ghost story contest. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Polidori wrote "The Vampyre," which established the aristocratic vampire archetype Bram Stoker used for Dracula 78 years later.
Mount Tambora erupted in April 1815. Over the following year, it killed approximately 100,000 people. It also helped write Frankenstein and Dracula.
The year it stopped being summer
Tambora's eruption was the largest in recorded history. The volcanic explosivity index ranks eruptions from 0 to 8. Tambora was a 7. It ejected 24 cubic miles of ash and sulfur into the stratosphere. The plume reached 27 miles high. The island of Sumbawa was destroyed. Around 10,000 people died immediately from the pyroclastic flows.
That was the smaller part of the death toll.
Ash spread across the northern hemisphere and blocked sunlight for more than a year. Global temperatures dropped 3 degrees Celsius. 1816 became the Year Without a Summer. Snow fell in New England in June and July. Crops failed across Europe and North America. Historian John D. Post called it "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world." In parts of Switzerland, food prices tripled. People ate cats.
The skies across Europe turned red and orange from the suspended particulate. JMW Turner painted them obsessively. Some of his most famous canvases are those lurid, apocalyptic sunsets, and Turner had no idea what was coloring them. Atmospheric science didn't exist yet. He just knew the sky looked like that and he kept painting it.
Six people inside a villa
That June, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron's physician John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont rented a villa on Lake Geneva. The Villa Diodati. They had come for the summer.
No summer arrived. It rained every day. Cold and dark. They stayed inside.
They read Fantasmagoriana, a French translation of German ghost stories, until that ran out. Then Byron proposed a contest. Each of them would write a ghost story.
Percy started something and left it unfinished. Byron started something and abandoned it. Polidori started a story about a skull-headed woman and got stuck. Mary couldn't think of anything for days.
She sat with the blank page. The rain kept coming.
George Forster's eye
One night, Byron and Percy started talking about galvanism. Specifically, about whether electricity could reanimate dead tissue.
Not an abstract question in 1816. Thirteen years earlier, on January 18, 1803, Giovanni Aldini had performed an experiment at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Aldini was Luigi Galvani's nephew. He'd spent years scaling up his uncle's frog-leg experiments into something much more theatrical.
The subject was George Forster, a convicted murderer freshly hanged at Newgate Prison. Aldini connected a Voltaic pile battery and ran current through the body. Forster's jaw contracted. His muscles convulsed. One eye opened. His fist clenched and rose. A spectator fainted. The papers covered it for weeks.
Mary Shelley knew about Aldini. Her father William Godwin ran a household full of scientists and philosophers. She grew up at dinner tables where galvanism was part of the conversation. The question of reanimation wasn't science fiction to her. It was ongoing.
That night at Villa Diodati, listening to Percy and Byron argue about it, she had what she later described as a waking nightmare. She saw a pale student kneeling beside a thing he had assembled. She watched the thing move.
She had her story.
What Polidori did with Byron's leftovers
Byron abandoned his ghost story. Polidori didn't.
Polidori was 20 years old and deeply uncomfortable in that room. Byron was his employer and had spent most of the trip humiliating him in front of guests. Polidori's diary from that summer documents a man who wanted to quit every day but couldn't afford to. He once challenged Percy Shelley to a duel. Percy declined.
He took Byron's abandoned fragment and turned it into something. The villain was an aristocratic, predatory charmer who drained the life from those around him. Polidori named him Lord Ruthven. Ruthven was, unmistakably, Byron. Everyone who read it knew.
The Vampyre was published in 1819 in the New Monthly Magazine. The publisher attributed it to Byron without asking. Byron denied writing it. Polidori wrote an indignant letter to the editor. None of this slowed it down. The story spread across Europe and ran as the dominant vampire narrative for decades.
Before The Vampyre, vampires were peasant corpses in Slavic folklore: bloated, disease-spreading revenants that returned from the grave to attack livestock and neighbors. Not aristocratic. Not seductive. Not remotely romantic. Polidori changed all of that. He put the vampire in a tailcoat and gave it a drawing room. Every vampire that followed borrowed from that template. Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, 78 years after The Vampyre. He'd read it. Dracula is Lord Ruthven, refined.
Polidori died in 1821, age 25. Likely suicide by prussic acid. He never got credit.
Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, anonymously. Reviewers assumed Percy wrote it. Mary was 19. Percy drowned at 29. Byron died of fever at 36, fighting for Greek independence. Claire Clairmont outlived all of them. She died in 1879, age 80, the only one from that summer who made it to old age.
The ghost story contest lasted two days. All because a volcano in Indonesia had a bad year.
Great views of Mount Tambora.
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora blew off the top of the mountain. The peak's elevation dropped by about one-third, going from roughly 14,000 to 14,100 feet (4,300 meters) down to 2,851 meters (9,354 to 9,348 feet). The massive explosion and emptying of the magma chamber left behind a giant bowl-shaped crater (caldera) measuring about 4 to 6 miles (6 to 7 kilometers) across and over 2,000 to 3,600+ feet deep.
This famous artwork depicts the Mount Tambora volcanic eruption in Indonesia, which culminated in April 1815 and caused the infamous "Year Without a Summer" in 1816.
The 1883 eruption of the volcanic island of Krakatoa (in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, Indonesia) was one of the most violent and destructive volcanic events in recorded history. The disaster was a crescendo of volcanic activity spanning five months, rather than a single isolated explosion. The activity occured from May 20 to October 21, 1883. The most violent explosions happened on August 26 and 27, 1883, peaking with the third and largest explosion at 10:02 a.m. on August 27. The eruption rated VEI 6 on the scale with a force estimated to be roughly 200 megatons of TNT (about 13,000 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb). The 10:02 a.m. blast is recorded as the loudest sound ever heard on Earth, heard over 4,700 km away (as far as Australia) and registering shock waves that circled the planet seven times. Massive pyroclastic flows and the collapse of the island into an undersea caldera generated tsunamis up to 40 meters (135 feet) high. Over 36,000 people died, with the vast majority killed by the colossal tsunamis that struck coastal Java and Sumatra, wiping out 165 villages..Tons of sulfur dioxide and ash injected into the stratosphere scattered sunlight, caused global temperatures to drop by about 0.5°C to 1.2°C for several years, and created vivid red sunsets and blue moons worldwide. Over 70% of the original island was destroyed, leaving a marine caldera. Decades later, a new volcanic child cone named Anak Krakatau ("Child of Krakatoa") rose from the same area in 1927. These are actual, real photographs taken of the two of the early explosions from the Krakatoa volcano. The first photo was taken during the early phases of the volcano waking up, a passenger named Mr. Hamburg aboard the tourist ship Gouverneur Generaal Loudon managed to take an authentic photograph of the eruption column. Not sure about the source for the second photo, but it was taken from a passing ship in the Sunda Strait on August 26, 1883, it captures active smoke and ash plumes just hours before the major cataclysmic explosions.
Before the eruption of Krakatau in 1883, Rakata Island consisted of three volcanoes: Rakata, Banan, and Perboewatan. During the eruption of the Krakatoa caldera, two of these volcanoes were completely destroyed, leaving the third volcano split in two.
The 1883 Krakatoa eruption generated a series of catastrophic tsunamis, which were actually responsible for the vast majority of the eruption's estimated 36,000 casualties. The primary, most destructive tsunami was triggered on August 27, 1883, when the volcano's massive magma chamber emptied, causing the island to violently collapse into the ocean. Massive volumes of superheated volcanic rock and ash also plunged into the sea, rapidly displacing enormous amounts of water. The largest waves reached staggering heights of up to 135 feet (41 meters), completely destroying the coastal town of Merak in Java. The energy from the tsunamis was so immense that it registered on tide gauges thousands of miles away, including in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and even as far away as the English Channel. In the Netflix series La Palma, a Norwegian family goes on holiday to the Canary Islands when a young researcher discovers alarming signs of an imminent volcanic eruption. Cumbre Vieja is an active volcano on La Palma, which last erupted in 2021. The series culminates in a "megatsunami" capable of engulfing Europe and reaching as far as the west coast of the US. In the Netflix miniseries, the tsunami is caused by a massive volcanic flank collapse at the Cumbre Vieja volcano. Preceded by volcanic gas emissions and ash eruptions, an imminent eruption destabilizes the western side of the mountain. A huge section of the volcanic island (comparable in size to Manhattan) breaks off and plunges into the Atlantic Ocean. The massive rock slide displaces a huge volume of water, triggering a catastrophic mega-tsunami that threatens the Canary Islands and the wider Atlantic. While the plot is inspired by a real 2001 scientific hypothesis, actual volcanologists and modern studies have heavily debunked the idea of a catastrophic Atlantic-spanning mega-tsunami from Cumbre Vieja, showing that real-world collapses happen in smaller, gradual stages. It's still a terrifying scene.
You can't talk about volcanic eruptions in history without mentioning the most famous of all them all, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii in 79 AD. The volcano erupted on August 24, 79 AD. The eruption started at approximately 1:00 P.M. Pyroclastic flows were the primary and final killer of the people who remained in Pompeii. While thousands of residents successfully evacuated during the initial hours of the eruption, archaeological and volcanological data indicates that approximately 62% of the victims found in Pompeii died during the pyroclastic surge phase. The death toll was divided across distinct phases of the eruption:
The Pumice Rain & Building Collapses (First ~18 Hours)
During the early phase, Vesuvius rained down a massive volume of pumice and ash. About 38% of the victims found in Pompeii died during this time.
• Cause of death: These individuals were largely found inside buildings. They chose to shelter indoors from the falling stones, only to be crushed when heavy accumulations of volcanic debris caused the roofs and walls to collapse.
• Earthquakes: Powerful concurrent earthquakes also triggered structural failures, pinning refugees beneath heavy stone.
The Pyroclastic Flows (The Dawn of Day Two)
The definitive blow to the city came the following morning when the towering eruption column collapsed, sending multiple waves of superheated gas, ash, and rock rushing down the volcano at hurricane speeds.
• Cause of death: Anyone still alive in the city was killed almost instantly. Recent bio-anthropological studies have altered our understanding of how they died. While scientists long believed the victims slowly suffocated on toxic ash, data shows that the pyroclastic flows reached Pompeii at temperatures between 200°C and 300°C (392°F to 572°F).
• Thermal Shock: This extreme heat triggered instant thermal shock. It knocked out vital organs and contracted muscles instantly into a "pugilist pose" (a fetal-like posture with curled limbs), leaving no time for agony or suffocation. It was this later encasement in cooling ash that formed the hollow spaces used to create the famous plaster casts. Nearby Herculaneum, which sat closer to the volcano, was hit by even hotter currents (up to 500°C/932°F), instantly vaporizing bodily tissues upon impact. Pompeii's distance allowed the flows to cool slightly, but they remained fully lethal.
You can't help but feel horrible for the ancient Romans and all victims of volcanic eruptions. The ancient Romans did not realize that Mount Vesuvius was an active volcano capable of a catastrophic eruption. Mount Vesuvius had been dormant for centuries—and hadn't experienced a major eruption in roughly 1,800 years—leaving it covered in lush vineyards, farms, and villas rather than looking like a threat. Ancient Romans had no scientific framework for "volcanoes" (the word volcano itself was later derived from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire) and did not view Mount Vesuvius as a mountain that could blow up. While some classical writers like Strabo noted that the dark rock around the peak looked "eaten by fire" or resembled volcanic stone from Sicily's Mount Etna, these observations were obscure literary or geographic notes not known or understood by ordinary citizens. The region was prone to earthquakes—including a severe tremor in 62 AD or 63 AD that heavily damaged Pompeii—but residents viewed these as routine seismic events or religious omens rather than precursors to a volcanic blast. When Mount Vesuvius finally erupted in 79 AD, the terrifying Plinian ash cloud and subsequent pyroclastic surges caught the population completely off guard. If you want to see what that day was like, this is a pretty accurate portrayal. The first time I watched this video, my heart sunk. It's like looking back in time and being in Pompeii on that fateful day. It's surreal, and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Pompeii, Italy - 79 AD and now. In under 24 hours, Mount Vesuvius buried a thriving Roman metropolis under meters of ash. Pompeii was buried for nearly 1,700 years before it was initially rediscovered, and about 1,669 years before systematic excavations officially began. The ruins were first encountered in 1599 by the architect Domenico Fontana while digging an underground water channel, though the site was not actively excavated or fully recognized at the time. In 1748, systematic, official excavations began under Spanish military engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre. In 1763, an inscription reading “Rei publicae Pompeianorum” was uncovered, officially identifying the ruins as the lost city of Pompeii.
Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) was a prominent Roman lawyer, author, and magistrate who wrote the only surviving firsthand eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Because of his detailed descriptions, volcanologists today use the term "Plinian eruption" to describe highly explosive volcanic events characterized by massive ash columns that resemble pine trees. Pliny was 17 years old during the disaster. He was staying across the Bay of Naples at Misenum with his mother and his famous uncle, Pliny the Elder (a celebrated scholar and commander of the Roman fleet).
His connection to the event relies on two famous letters he wrote decades later to the historian Tacitus, which provide invaluable historic and scientific details:
The Description of the Ash Cloud
Pliny was the first to describe the terrifying visual of the eruption column. He wrote that its shape looked most like a Mediterranean pine tree, shooting up to a great height on a massive "trunk" before splitting into dark branches. This perfectly describes the convective column of a modern volcanic explosion.
The Rescue Mission and Death of Pliny the Elder
When the volcano erupted, Pliny the Elder launched Roman warships on a dual mission: to scientifically investigate the phenomenon and to rescue friends trapped at the base of Vesuvius. Pliny the Younger stayed behind to finish his studies. His uncle successfully made landfall at Stabiae but died on the beach, likely suffocated by toxic volcanic gases.
The Terror and Evacuation
In his second letter, Pliny the Younger described the harrowing experience of fleeing Misenum as the disaster escalated. He detailed:
• Continuous, violent earthquakes that shook the carriages.
• The sea being "sucked back" from the shore (a precursor to a tsunami).
• A terrifying, dense black cloud rolling across the land like a flood, plunging the world into total darkness "like a room when the light is out."
The 2014 film Pompeii is not directly based on Pliny the Younger, but it uses his famous historical letters as the foundational blueprint for how the eruption unfolds on screen. The eruption scene in the movie Pompeii gets the broad chronological sequence of events right, including the initial earthquakes, the massive ash and pumice explosion, and the lethal pyroclastic flows (superheated avalanches of gas and rock) described by Pliny the Younger. However, it takes major Hollywood artistic liberties with specific visual and physical phenomena.
What the Movie Got Right
• Sequence of Events: It follows the general progression of the A.D. 79 disaster, moving from preliminary tremors to sky-darkening ash columns and rolling pyroclastic surges.
• City Architecture & Topography: The production used LiDAR scanning and archaeological data to accurately map out the streets, buildings, amphitheater, and layout of the ancient city.
• Volcanic Mechanics: Volcanologists noted that the film realistically captured the terrifying atmospheric and seismic buildup before the mountain collapsed.
What the Movie Got Wrong
• Flaming Lava Bombs: The film shows massive, glowing, fire-trailing "lava bombs" raining down on the streets, whereas the historical eruption mostly dropped suffocating grey pumice stones and rock debris.
• The Harbor Tsunami: It depicts a giant, inland-surging tsunami that sweeps massive seagoing ships straight into the middle of the city. While minor seismic sea-level disturbances occurred, there is no archaeological evidence of a catastrophic harbor-destroying wave of that scale.
• Pyroclastic Flow Appearance: The pyroclastic flows are styled as slow-moving walls of active flame rather than the blistering-hot, fast-moving, black-and-grey clouds of toxic ash and superheated gas that actually incinerated everything in their path.
• Timeline Compression: The film compresses days and hours of terror into a hyper-accelerated sequence where characters outrun collapsing structures and pyroclastic waves in real time.
Like I said earlier, the pryoclastic flow was the main killer in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the film Pompeii really captures just how terrifying pyroclastic flow is. Here is the famous eruption scene from the 2014 film Pompeii.
Six leaves at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, New York are all that remain of the earliest known copy of the letters of Pliny the Younger. The Letters provide fascinating insights into daily life in first-century Rome—including, most famously, Pliny’s firsthand account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 and descriptions of his dealings with the burgeoning Christian community. Although written in Italy, the manuscript survived for centuries in France, eventually forming part of the celebrated library at the Abbey of Saint Victor, near Paris. It was ‘discovered’ there by Renaissance scholars from Italy, who recognized its value as the oldest and most complete copy of Pliny’s text. They sent it to Venice, where it provided the basis for the first printed edition of the Letters in 1508. Probably as a result of this period of intense study and use, the ancient manuscript was lost, but for the fragment Pierpont Morgan acquired in 1910. This manuscript leaf is the Morgan Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger (MS M.462), held by The Morgan Library & Museum.
Mount Vesuvius as it all today. It is still an active volcano. It is currently resting in a state of quiescence (dormancy) and has not erupted since March 1944. The volcano is at a green alert level, meaning monitored parameters (such as low seismicity and stable crater temperatures) are within normal background activity. It still shows minor signs of life, including sulfur-rich steam and gas (fumaroles) venting from the crater and low-level seismic activity. The INGV – Osservatorio Vesuviano monitors the volcano 24/7 for any signs of ground deformation or changes in behavior. Because it has erupted repeatedly in history—including the famous AD 79 destruction of Pompeii and its last eruption in 1944—it is classified as active and capable of erupting again. Located near Naples in a densely populated region of Italy, it is monitored closely with emergency and evacuation plans in place.
You can take a tour of Mount Vesuvius today, provided the weather and volcanic conditions are clear of orange or red weather alerts. To reach the crater of Mount Vesuvius, you must hike Nature Trail No. 5, known as Il Gran Cono, which begins at the Piazzale di Quota 1000 parking area and bus terminus. It is approximately 4 km (2.5 miles) round trip to walk up, explore a portion of the rim, and head back down. The trailhead sits at roughly 1,000 meters above sea level, and you will ascend an additional 140 to 175 meters (approx. 500–580 feet) to reach the highest public section of the rim at 1,175 meters. It typically takes 25 to 45 minutes of steady uphill walking to reach the rim, and about 1.5 to 2 hours total for the entire round trip. The route consists of steep, dusty switchbacks along a wide path. The surface is made of loose volcanic gravel, ash, pumice, and lapilli. This can make the ground slippery and slide under your feet, particularly on the descent. The entire trail is completely exposed to the elements with absolutely no shade. The bottom photo shows a visitor standing right above the crater at the top.
A view inside the crater at the top, you can see steam on the right hand side of the third photo from the volcano still being active. Visitors are not allowed to go inside or descend into the crater of Mount Vesuvius. The crater is roughly 300 meters (about 985 to 1,000 feet) deep, and public entry into the interior bowl is strictly prohibited for safety and preservation reasons.
Another view inside the crater. I have to say, it would be surreal and humbling to stand at the top of Mount Vesuvius and look down inside that crater, where all hell broke loose in 79 AD.
The process of making plaster casts of the Pompeii victims was discovered and developed in 1863 by the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli. While excavating the ancient site, Giuseppe Fiorelli noticed empty cavities in the hardened volcanic ash where organic remains had decomposed beneath the layers from the 79 AD Mount Vesuvius eruption. He realized these hollow spaces preserved the exact shapes of the bodies. He began pouring a liquid mixture of plaster of Paris (and sometimes glue) directly into the small openings of these voids. Once the plaster hardened, the surrounding volcanic material was carefully chipped away, revealing a detailed, lifelike form of the victim in their final posture, complete with clothing folds and facial expressions. The plaster casts of the Pompeii victims are famous because they turn abstract ancient history into a visceral, human moment, preserving the exact body positions, facial expressions, and clothing folds of people trapped by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. Unlike typical skeletal remains, the casts capture dynamic, haunting details—such as families huddling together, people trying to shield their faces, clothing textures, footwear, and even facial expressions at the moment of death. These are not hollow statues; many of the casts encase the actual original bones, teeth, and jewelry of the ancient residents inside the plaster shell. By shortening the temporal distance of nearly 2,000 years, the casts allow modern humans to look directly into the personal tragedy of the individuals. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii in 79 AD is one of the most famous and tragic events in ancient history. It has been portrayed over and over again in books, documentaries, cinema, but to see the actual ancient Romans who lived and died that day in Pompeii in 79 AD up close, in their final moments as the volcano erupted almost 2,000 years ago, it simply cannot be put into words.
Let's look at Pompeii today, beautiful ancient city. The image shows the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius in Campania, Italy. The city surrounding the ancient ruins in this picture is the modern town of Pompei (spelled with a single "i" in Italian to distinguish it from the ancient site, which is spelled Pompeii). The modern municipality is located in the Metropolitan City of Naples, within the Campania region of Italy. The ancient ruins sit right alongside this living, thriving town of roughly 24,000 residents, all situated right under the slopes of the prominent Mount Vesuvius seen in the background.
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On May 18, 1980, after a series of earthquakes, an eruption column rose 80,000 feet into the atmosphere depositing ash into 11 neighboring states. The hot mix of lava and pulverized rock also caused snow, ice and glaciers on the volcano to melt, creating volcanic mudslides. Stunning image.
Volcanic ash filled the skies in Washington and nearby states for days, seen here over the airport in Ephrata, Wash. on May 19, 1980. The ash blotted out the sun and fell like snow, drifting as high as two feet. It crushed crops, caused schools and businesses to close, and halted nearly all transportation, stranding thousands of motorists. Another stunning image, like something out of an apocalypse movie.
Thousands of trees were flattened and reduced to nothing but logs in the wake of the devastating eruption. What was once a dense forest is a wasteland as trees were broken at their trunks as easily as blades of grass.
Logs and debris are seen in this photo scattered near the Toutle River at Spirit Lake Road, Washington following the eruption. The eruption caused flash floods and mudslides that moved through logging operations in the area causing extensive damage.
The heat caused nearly all of the mountain’s glaciers and snow to melt, creating massive volcanic mudslides and floods that travelled as fast as 90 miles per hour. The material had the consistency of wet concrete as it raced down nearby creeks and rivers bringing down everything in its path.
Volcanic ash buried many vehicles during and after the eruption. Cars close to the volcano (within 10 kilometers northwest of the summit) were buried under thick volcanic ash.
This photo was taken at 3:00 PM after the eruption and shows how dark the skies were from being covered in ash. Two people walk the abandoned streets of Yakima, Washington as they cover their faces to protect themselves from breathing in the volcanic ash on May 18, 1980.
Steam rises from hot water in the river following the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington on May 19, 1980.
This 4-way comparison shows the same spot in 1979 to 1995. Back in 1979, the area surrounding Mount St. Helens was a dense forest popular for logging. A year after the eruption (bottom left), the area looked more like a dessert than a forest after all the damaged trees were removed. Even years later, little to no plant life can be seen in the area surrounding Mount St Helens (top and bottom right) as trees completely ceased to grow.
Log jam on the Cowlitz River as a result of Mt St Helens eruption.
Looking at those photos, the power of nature is truly humbling. Now just imagine a Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. A full eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would be thousands of times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Thousands. Supervolcanoes like Yellowstone reach a level 8 on the VEI scale, whereas Mount St. Helens was a level 5. Each whole number increase on the VEI scale represents a roughly tenfold increase in explosive volume. By the way, the VEI scale (Volcanic Explosivity Index) measures the power of a volcanic eruption. The scale goes up to a maximum value of 8. While theoretically open-ended, a VEI 8 represents a "mega-colossal" supereruption, and no known eruption in Earth's geological history has ever exceeded this category. The last known Yellowstone supervolcano eruption that occurred 631,000 years ago measured a VEI 8 on the scale.
Lake Toba is located in the Barisan Mountains in North Sumatra, Indonesia. It's a popular destination for tourists because of its beauty. Lake Toba is 62 miles long, 19 miles wide, and has a depth of 1,657 feet. But it's no ordinary lake. It's a reminder of the destructive force of nature. 74,000 years ago, a mountain in Sumatra, Indonesia, didn't just erupt. It ceased to exist. The Toba supervolcano had been building pressure for thousands of years. When it was finally released, it did so with a force that is almost impossible to comprehend. In just 9 to 14 days, it ejected 2,800 cubic kilometres of ash, rock and gas into the atmosphere — the largest eruption in the last 2 million years. Five thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. Pyroclastic flows buried the northern Sumatra coast to coast under 600 metres of superheated rock. The entire Indian subcontinent was blanketed in 15 centimetres of ash. The eruption cloud covered 7.5% of the entire surface of the Earth. Then the ground collapsed. The magma chamber beneath had emptied so fast that the roof caved in — creating a depression 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide. Over the thousands of years that followed, rain filled it. Rivers fed it. The most catastrophic event in human history slowly became the most beautiful lake in Southeast Asia. Today, Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake on Earth. Larger than Singapore. And rising from its center is Samosir Island — pushed upward by magma pressure still stirring below — an island inside a lake inside a sleeping supervolcano. The magma chamber beneath Toba still holds 50,000 cubic kilometres of eruptible magma. It is not extinct. It is waiting. You are not looking at three images. You are looking at one place — before, during and after the closest thing to an apocalypse our species has ever witnessed.
The Lake Toba supervolcano eruption was a VEI 8 on the scale, as bad as it gets. It's mind-bending to think that the eruption was so massive that the volcano collapsed in on itself, creating the 100-kilometer-long caldera that forms today's Lake Toba. A supervolcano eruption is responsible for this lake being here, 62 miles long, 19 miles wide, and 1,657 feet deep. That had to be an apocalyptic explosion. The eruption released massive amounts of sulfur dioxide, triggering a global "volcanic winter" that dropped global average temperatures by 3°C to 5°C (5.4°F to 9°F) for several years. In higher latitudes, temperatures plummeted by as much as 15°C (27°F), a devastating change in temperature for plant and animal life.
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Mount Toba: Did a Supervolcano Almost Wipe Out the Human Species?
The eruption of the Toba supervolcano, according to theory, plunged the world into an apocalypse, almost wiping out the entire human species.
Published: Jan 20, 2024
written by Greg Beyer, BA History & Linguistics, Journalism Diploma
Seventy-four thousand years ago, the Earth suffered a catastrophic event which, according to the Toba catastrophe theory, led to the extinction of many animals around the globe.
Ash covered the land. The sky was blanketed in darkness. Temperatures plummeted. Plants refused to grow. The few surviving human beings huddled together for warmth as the apocalyptic nightmare dragged on.
Seventy-four thousand years ago, the supervolcano Mount Toba on what is now Sumatra exploded. It was an extinction event that changed the world, and according to some academics, it almost wiped out the human species.
The Toba Catastrophe Theory
volcano eruption volumes
Comparison of volcanic eruption in terms of ejected material. Source: Public Domain via US Geological Survey
Compared with other animal species, there is a surprising lack of genetic diversity among humans. In fact, there is less genetic diversity between all eight billion of us than there is in a closely related troop of 50 chimpanzees. The reason for this was a mystery for many years until theories were put forward to explain the phenomenon.
The Toba catastrophe theory and the human bottleneck hypothesis posit that around 74,000 years ago, the human species almost went extinct. It resulted from a global catastrophe caused by the eruption of Mount Toba, the remains of which lie on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Climate models suggested that the average world temperature dropped by as much as 15 degrees Celsius in the wake of the eruption.
Genetic data contributed to the theory and suggested that the human species went through a genetic bottleneck – a severe reduction in the total gene pool – suggesting that the species was greatly reduced. Some academics posited that the species was reduced to a few thousand individuals with as few as 1,000 mating pairs in total. This would explain why there is so little genetic diversity among our species.
The theory posits that we survived in small groups scattered in various parts of Africa before repopulating.
Once widely accepted, however, this theory has come under renewed scrutiny over the past few years as evidence paints a more confusing picture as to how humanity coped.
The Eruption Data
Map showing the discovery of tephra (volcanic rock ejection) from the Toba supervolcano. Source: Erich Fisher/Phys.org
The explosivity index on which volcanoes are rated is called the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Like the Richter scale, which measures the power of earthquakes, each number increase represents a factor increase in 10. So, a VEI number of 5, for example, is ten times more powerful than a VEI number of 4.
The VEI number for Toba is estimated to be 8, the highest on the scale. For reference, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens measured 5. Toba was 1,000 times more powerful than Mount Saint Helens and 100 times more powerful than the Krakatoa eruption, which clocked in at VEI 6. Krakatoa was so powerful the sound of the blast curled the Earth four times!
In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora, measuring a 7 on the VEI scale, spewed so much ash into the air that 1816 was known as “the year without a summer.” Crops failed the world over, and it snowed in Virginia on July 4! Toba was more powerful than Tambora by a factor of 10.
As Toba exploded, those in the immediate surroundings would have had no chance of survival. Pyroclastic flow billowed from the site, superheated to 1100 degrees Celsius and traveled at 320 kilometers per hour. Anybody who came in contact with it would have died instantly.
Studies show that the total amount of dense-rock equivalent (DRE), the scientific term used when measuring volcanic ejection mass, was between 2,800 km3 (670 cu mi) and 6,000 km3 (1,400 cu mi). All of this tephra (or DRE) was ejected in the space of 9 to 14 days.
This completely dwarfs all volcanic eruptions in history, making the eruptions of Vesuvius and Mount Saint Helens seem tiny and insignificant by comparison.
How the Climate Changed
A handful of ash from India from a layer of earth dated to 74,000 years ago. Source: Indian Express
The exact effects of the eruption are difficult to determine through studying the sedimentary layer. However, there seems to have been a shift in climate that may or may not have been caused by the eruption. It is likely that a climate shift was already taking place and was accelerated by the Toba eruption. Temperatures dropped or were dropping significantly, ushering in the start of an ice age that forced many species to adapt.
If Toba were not directly responsible for the Ice Age, it would certainly have contributed to speeding it up.
What Could the Apocalypse Have Been Like?
A comparison of eruption sizes measured in ejected material. Source: Robert Krulwich/NPR
Many of the people who lived in Sumatra would have been killed in the initial few days of the explosion. Those unlucky enough to survive the first few days would have had a more drawn-out death as ash whipped through the air and covered the ground in several feet of its toxic mass. In India, 5,000 kilometers (3100 miles) away, six inches of ash covered the ground, and even further away, ash deposits from the Toba eruption have been found in Africa near Lake Malawi as well as on the southern coast of South Africa, 8,900 kilometers (5,530 miles) away.
While the ash may have looked light and fluffy like snow, the truth is that volcanic ash is heavy. It’s thick and toxic. Fine dust breathed in forms cement-like quality in the lungs; those who inhaled the ash would have suffocated, some in lingering torture. It also fell over all the water sources, turning rivers into slushy, ash-filled mud.
If the eruption of Tambora blanketed the sun and turned the entire following year into a miserable winter, Mount Toba would have been exponentially worse, with some academics positing the volcanic winter could have lasted hundreds of years. If this were the case, there would have certainly been an era of darkness and cold, which would have wiped out many plant and animal species and driven many others, including humans, to the brink of extinction.
If there were a mass die-off of plants and animals, humans would have struggled to survive.
Controversies & Arguments
Lake Toba on the Island of Sumatra – the remains of the Toba supervolcano. Source: Google Earth
Of course, the theory of the catastrophic Toba eruption causing a human bottleneck is debated by academics. Widely accepted during the 1990s and 2000s, the theory has come under intense scrutiny as more discoveries are made pertaining to the event.
What is accepted as fact is that Mount Toba erupted with a power and force that no human being had ever witnessed before. What is debated is how it affects the human species.
The bottleneck theory posits that the volcanic winter lasted as long as ten years and would have caused a mass die-off of plants, leading to mass starvation as food sources dwindled. Evidence also suggests that other animals were affected or coincidentally recovered from drastically reduced populations around this time. The East African chimpanzee, the Bornean orangutan, the central Indian macaque, the tiger, and the cheetah all show signs of having recovered from a bottleneck.
Homo floresiensis survived for around 20,000 years after the eruption of Mount Toba. Source: Flickr user Karen Neoh via Smithsonian Magazine
A 2021 study concluded that, according to the assumed amount of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere, the temperature drop would have been −3.5 °C (−6.3 °F), and temperatures would have returned to normal within five years of the Toba eruption. This disrupts the theory that a mass die-off of plants around the tropical regions happened.
What is also significant is the survival of other human species. Neanderthals were around until around 35,000 years ago, and the region in which they lived was already frigid. Further temperature drops would have made life far more difficult. But perhaps what’s most intriguing is that current theories suggest Homo floresiensis survived for at least 20,000 years after the eruption of Mount Toba. They lived just 2,600 kilometers (1600 miles) away on the Island of Flores.
The locations of Mount Toba and the Jurreru Valley, 2,600 kilometers (1,615 miles) apart. Source: Image created by author via Google Earth
Controversy also surrounds human survival on the Asian subcontinent, where significant amounts of ash blanketed the ground. India was directly in the path of the ash cloud and was one of the first substantial landmasses to be affected by the fallout. Opponents of the Toba catastrophe theory point out that there is evidence of abundant habitation in the Jurreru Valley directly before and after the eruption. Proponents of the theory, however, point out that other sites in India, such as the Middle Son Valley to the north of India, show a major population decline. They argue that people survived in the Jurreru Valley and sought refuge there as it was fed by springs – an uncontaminated supply of fresh water.
Similarly, evidence of thriving human populations on the southern coast of Africa may prove that humans weren’t as severely affected as previously thought or that this area may have constituted an area of refuge that was less affected than others.
Lake Toba today is an idyllic place that hides a catastrophic past. Source: Robert Harding Picture Library/National Geographic
While some evidence points to the idea that the human species almost went extinct, especially evidence regarding genetics, deep core samples, and climatic models could suggest otherwise. With what we know now, it is difficult to state anything as fact.
Whatever the case, however, Mount Toba’s eruption is the single greatest volcanic explosion ever experienced by humanity, and studying its effects could help us deal with the potential of another event of similar proportions.
What we do know for sure is that there are supervolcanoes that could blow their top without any warning. Whenever that happens, whether tomorrow or a hundred thousand years from now, it will be an extremely dark and terrifying day in human history.
The Toba supervolcano eruption was 5,000 times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption. Just think about that. In boxing terms, it had humanity on the ropes.
It's hard to imagine what an explosive event the Toba supervolcano erupting must have looked like.
The pyroclastic flow from the Toba super-eruption would have been approximately 1,100 °C (2,012 °F) and there would have been a lot of it. Anything within hundreds of kilometers of the Lake Toba vent in northern Sumatra was completely wiped out, buried under massive layers of hot, concrete-like volcanic rock and ash.
Highly recommended book about the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago.
Another volcano eruption that impacted the world on a massive scale was the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest recorded volcano eruption in human history. The eruption is referred to as the "Year Without a Summer" because the massive explosion injected millions of tons of ash, sulfur dioxide, and aerosols into the stratosphere, forming a global shield that blocked sunlight and triggered a severe volcanic winter in 1816. In April 1815, Mount Tambora located on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia erupted in one of the most powerful volcanic events in recorded history (Volcanic Explosivity Index of 7). Lighter sulfur gases and ash particles rose high into the stratosphere, circling the globe and reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. The reduced sunlight caused global average temperatures to drop by roughly 1.5°F to 5.4°F (1°C to 3°C), chilling the Northern Hemisphere. Regions across North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia experienced freezing temperatures, heavy June snowstorms (including up to a foot of snow in New England), and killing mid-summer frosts in July and August. The cold weather and lack of sunlight destroyed crops and killed livestock, leading to widespread food shortages, soaring grain prices, and famine across Europe and North America. The gloomy, dark weather trapped people indoors—inspiring Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein—and triggered mass migrations as desperate farmers moved westward across the United States. The eruption literally caused a year without a summer. This is actually a book about the eruption and Mary Shelley penning Frankenstein.
Great article written by the New York Times 200 years after the Tambora volcano eruption of 1815, the "Year Without a Summer" eruption.
A Volcanic Eruption That Reverberates 200 Years Later
The deep volcanic crater, top, was produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 - the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history.Credit...Iwan Setiyawan/KOMPAS, via Associated Press
By: William J. Broad
Aug. 24, 2015
In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters.
Around the lush isles of the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — the eruption of Mount Tambora killed tens of thousands of people. They were burned alive or killed by flying rocks, or they died later of starvation because the heavy ash smothered crops.
More surprising, investigators have found that the giant cloud of minuscule particles spread around the globe, blocked sunlight and produced three years of planetary cooling. In June 1816, a blizzard pummeled upstate New York. That July and August, killer frosts in New England ravaged farms. Hailstones pounded London all summer.
A recent history of the disaster, “Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World,” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, shows planetary effects so extreme that many nations and communities sustained waves of famine, disease, civil unrest and economic decline. Crops failed globally.
“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have loomed large in art and literature ever since.
“The paper trail,” said Dr. Wood, a University of Illinois professor of English, “goes back again and again to Tambora.”
The Mount Tambora eruption's profound aftermath influenced the skies of 19th-century paintings like “Chichester Canal,” above, by J.M.W. Turner.Credit...Tate, London 2015
The gargantuan blast — 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens’s — and its ensuing worldwide pall have been the subject of increasing study over the years as scientists have sought to comprehend not only the planet’s climatological past but the future likelihood of such global disasters.
Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, who has studied the Tambora catastrophe, put the chance of a similar explosion in the next half-century as relatively low — perhaps 10 percent. But the consequences, he added, could run extraordinarily high.
“The modern world,” Dr. Oppenheimer said, “is far from immune to the potentially catastrophic impacts.”
Before it exploded, Tambora was the tallest peak in a land of cloudy summits. It lay atop the tropic isle of Sumbawa, its spires rising nearly three miles. Long dormant, the mountain was considered a home to gods. Villages dotted its slopes, and nearby farmers grew rice, coffee and pepper.
On the evening of April 5, 1815, according to contemporary accounts, flames shot from its summit and the earth rumbled for hours. The volcano then fell silent.
Five days later, the peak exploded in a deafening roar of fire, rock and boiling ash that was heard hundreds of miles away. Flaming rivers of molten rock ran down the slopes, destroying tropic forests and villages. Days later, still raging but by then hollow, the mountain collapsed, its height suddenly diminished by a mile.
Locally, an estimated 100,000 people died. Sumbawa never recovered.
The repercussions were global, but no one realized that the widespread death and mayhem arose from an eruption halfway around the world. What emerged was regional folklore. New Englanders called 1816 “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” Germans called 1817 the year of the beggar. These and many other local episodes remained unknown or unconnected.
An early rendering of Frankenstein. In the cold and stormy summer of 1816, while on holiday in Switzerland, Mary Shelley came up with her lurid tale.Credit...The British Library Board
It was scientists who began to stitch together the big picture, especially the peculiar link between fiery volcanism and icy weather. An overarching goal was to separate natural climate fluctuations from those of human origin. One after another, studies came back to New England and its frigid summer of 1816.
Dr. Wood expanded the portrait in his book, which is due out in paperback next month. It draws on hundreds of scientific papers as well as Dr. Wood’s knowledge of 19th-century literature to lay bare three years of planetary mayhem as well as the origins of fictional demons.
“My interest was to understand a global event,” Dr. Wood said in an interview, “and that meant serious detective work in lots of unfamiliar archives.” Five years of inquiry took him to China, Europe and India.
It also transported him to Tambora, where he braved leeches and razor-sharp leaves to peer across its yawning caldera, four miles from rim to rim.
The exploding mountain, the book notes, heaved some 12 cubic miles of earthen matter to a height of more than 25 miles. While coarse particles soon rained out, finer ones traveled the high winds in a spreading cloud. “It passed,” Dr. Wood wrote, “across both south and north poles, leaving a telltale sulfate imprint on the ice for paleoclimatologists to discover more than a century and a half later.”
The global veil, high above rain clouds, reflected much sunlight back into space. So the planet cooled. The pall, Dr. Wood said, also spawned tempests far below.
His book reprints an 1816 oil painting of Weymouth Bay, a sheltered cove on England’s south coast, by John Constable — the sky above churning with dark clouds. “Everywhere,” Dr. Wood said, “the volcanic winds blew hard.” He noted that both history and computer models speak of fierce storms back then.
A harbor scene by Caspar David Friedrich, painted after the Tambora eruption, depicts a vivid sky.Credit...Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.
The particles high in the atmosphere also produced spectacular sunsets, as detailed in the famous paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the English landscape pioneer. His vivid red skies, Dr. Wood remarked, “seem like an advertisement for the future of art.”
The story also comes alive in local dramas, none more important for literary history than the birth of Frankenstein’s monster and the human vampire. That happened on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where some of the most famous names of English poetry had gone on a summer holiday.
By 1816, Switzerland, landlocked and famously rugged, was beginning to reel from the bad weather and failed crops. Starving mobs stormed bakeries after bread prices soared. The book recounts a priest’s distress: “It is terrifying to see these walking skeletons devour the most repulsive foods with such avidity.”
That June, the cold and stormy weather sent the English tourists inside a lakeside villa to warm themselves by a fire and exchange ghost stories. Mary Shelley, then 18, was part of a literary coterie that included Percy Shelley, her future husband, as well as Lord Byron. Wine flowed, as did laudanum, a form of opium. Candles flickered.
In this moody atmosphere, Mary Shelley came up with her lurid tale of Frankenstein, which she published two years later. And Lord Byron hit on the outline of the modern vampire tale, published later by a compatriot as “The Vampyre.” The freakish weather also inspired Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness.”
Dr. Wood’s book documents many other repercussions of the planetary chill, devoting a chapter to a cholera pandemic of 1817 that began in India and globally killed tens of millions of people. Dr. Wood attributes its rise to a deadly combination of monsoonal changes and pounding rains — a main theory of leading cholera detectives.
The pandemic spread and eventually reached the Dutch East Indies. On Java alone it killed an estimated 125,000 people — more, Dr. Wood noted, “than died in the volcanic eruption itself.”
He also profiles the wintry chill in Yunnan Province in southern China, a land of mountains and jungles roamed by tigers and elephants. Rice crops there quickly failed, and famine gnawed deep for years. In July 1816, Dr. Wood noted, the province had “unprecedented snows.”
The poet, Li Yuyang, who was 32 as Tambora began its global rampage, wrote of cold downpours and flash flooding in “A Sigh for Autumn Rain.”
Water spilling from the eaves deafens me.
People rush from falling houses in their thousands
And tens of thousands, for the work of the rain
Is worse than the work of thieves. Bricks crack. Walls fall.
In an instant, the house is gone.
Dr. Wood closes with a portrait of the eastern United States in 1816, focusing first on upstate New York. One day that June, four young classmates walked to school, most barefoot. Then a blizzard struck. Dismissed early, the children ran for their lives as the snow rose to their knees. They succeeded in reaching warm cabins and fires.
For Thomas Jefferson, the pain lasted longer. The retired third president of the United States, at his estate in Virginia, faced a disastrous summer in 1816 because of the remarkably short growing season. The next year was just as bad.
In a letter, Jefferson expressed concern about the possible ruin of his Monticello farm “if the seasons should, against the course of nature hitherto observed, continue constantly hostile to our agriculture.”
The countless victims and occasional beneficiaries of Tambora’s fury were oblivious to the volcanic roots of their circumstances, Dr. Wood noted, making the challenge of writing about it formidable and “occasionally mind-bending.”
More generally, he said, the revelation of global volcanic ruin — a portrait 200 years in the making — offers a kind of meditation on the difficulty of uncovering the subtle effects of climate change, whether its origins lie in nature’s fury or the invisible byproducts of human civilization.
It is, Dr. Wood remarked, “hard to see and no less difficult to imagine.”
Ok, here is a bit of the inside scoop about the "Year Without a Summer" eruption and Mary Shelley creating the legendary Frankenstein. Interestingly, the eruption would also lead to the creation of another classic horror story, Dracula.
The Volcano That Created Frankenstein and Dracula
How did a volcano create Frankenstein and Dracula? In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history. The ash cloud blocked sunlight across the northern hemisphere, turning 1816 into the "Year Without a Summer." That June, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori were trapped indoors at Villa Diodati in Switzerland during the perpetual cold and dark. Byron proposed a ghost story contest. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Polidori wrote "The Vampyre," which established the aristocratic vampire archetype Bram Stoker used for Dracula 78 years later.
Mount Tambora erupted in April 1815. Over the following year, it killed approximately 100,000 people. It also helped write Frankenstein and Dracula.
The year it stopped being summer
Tambora's eruption was the largest in recorded history. The volcanic explosivity index ranks eruptions from 0 to 8. Tambora was a 7. It ejected 24 cubic miles of ash and sulfur into the stratosphere. The plume reached 27 miles high. The island of Sumbawa was destroyed. Around 10,000 people died immediately from the pyroclastic flows.
That was the smaller part of the death toll.
Ash spread across the northern hemisphere and blocked sunlight for more than a year. Global temperatures dropped 3 degrees Celsius. 1816 became the Year Without a Summer. Snow fell in New England in June and July. Crops failed across Europe and North America. Historian John D. Post called it "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world." In parts of Switzerland, food prices tripled. People ate cats.
The skies across Europe turned red and orange from the suspended particulate. JMW Turner painted them obsessively. Some of his most famous canvases are those lurid, apocalyptic sunsets, and Turner had no idea what was coloring them. Atmospheric science didn't exist yet. He just knew the sky looked like that and he kept painting it.
Six people inside a villa
That June, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron's physician John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont rented a villa on Lake Geneva. The Villa Diodati. They had come for the summer.
No summer arrived. It rained every day. Cold and dark. They stayed inside.
They read Fantasmagoriana, a French translation of German ghost stories, until that ran out. Then Byron proposed a contest. Each of them would write a ghost story.
Percy started something and left it unfinished. Byron started something and abandoned it. Polidori started a story about a skull-headed woman and got stuck. Mary couldn't think of anything for days.
She sat with the blank page. The rain kept coming.
George Forster's eye
One night, Byron and Percy started talking about galvanism. Specifically, about whether electricity could reanimate dead tissue.
Not an abstract question in 1816. Thirteen years earlier, on January 18, 1803, Giovanni Aldini had performed an experiment at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Aldini was Luigi Galvani's nephew. He'd spent years scaling up his uncle's frog-leg experiments into something much more theatrical.
The subject was George Forster, a convicted murderer freshly hanged at Newgate Prison. Aldini connected a Voltaic pile battery and ran current through the body. Forster's jaw contracted. His muscles convulsed. One eye opened. His fist clenched and rose. A spectator fainted. The papers covered it for weeks.
Mary Shelley knew about Aldini. Her father William Godwin ran a household full of scientists and philosophers. She grew up at dinner tables where galvanism was part of the conversation. The question of reanimation wasn't science fiction to her. It was ongoing.
That night at Villa Diodati, listening to Percy and Byron argue about it, she had what she later described as a waking nightmare. She saw a pale student kneeling beside a thing he had assembled. She watched the thing move.
She had her story.
What Polidori did with Byron's leftovers
Byron abandoned his ghost story. Polidori didn't.
Polidori was 20 years old and deeply uncomfortable in that room. Byron was his employer and had spent most of the trip humiliating him in front of guests. Polidori's diary from that summer documents a man who wanted to quit every day but couldn't afford to. He once challenged Percy Shelley to a duel. Percy declined.
He took Byron's abandoned fragment and turned it into something. The villain was an aristocratic, predatory charmer who drained the life from those around him. Polidori named him Lord Ruthven. Ruthven was, unmistakably, Byron. Everyone who read it knew.
The Vampyre was published in 1819 in the New Monthly Magazine. The publisher attributed it to Byron without asking. Byron denied writing it. Polidori wrote an indignant letter to the editor. None of this slowed it down. The story spread across Europe and ran as the dominant vampire narrative for decades.
Before The Vampyre, vampires were peasant corpses in Slavic folklore: bloated, disease-spreading revenants that returned from the grave to attack livestock and neighbors. Not aristocratic. Not seductive. Not remotely romantic. Polidori changed all of that. He put the vampire in a tailcoat and gave it a drawing room. Every vampire that followed borrowed from that template. Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, 78 years after The Vampyre. He'd read it. Dracula is Lord Ruthven, refined.
Polidori died in 1821, age 25. Likely suicide by prussic acid. He never got credit.
Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, anonymously. Reviewers assumed Percy wrote it. Mary was 19. Percy drowned at 29. Byron died of fever at 36, fighting for Greek independence. Claire Clairmont outlived all of them. She died in 1879, age 80, the only one from that summer who made it to old age.
The ghost story contest lasted two days. All because a volcano in Indonesia had a bad year.
Great views of Mount Tambora.
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora blew off the top of the mountain. The peak's elevation dropped by about one-third, going from roughly 14,000 to 14,100 feet (4,300 meters) down to 2,851 meters (9,354 to 9,348 feet). The massive explosion and emptying of the magma chamber left behind a giant bowl-shaped crater (caldera) measuring about 4 to 6 miles (6 to 7 kilometers) across and over 2,000 to 3,600+ feet deep.
This famous artwork depicts the Mount Tambora volcanic eruption in Indonesia, which culminated in April 1815 and caused the infamous "Year Without a Summer" in 1816.
1816, the "Year Without a Summer."
Another great book about the Tambora volcano eruption of 1815.
Let's get a music break in here, haven't had one in a while.
The 1883 eruption of the volcanic island of Krakatoa (in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, Indonesia) was one of the most violent and destructive volcanic events in recorded history. The disaster was a crescendo of volcanic activity spanning five months, rather than a single isolated explosion. The activity occured from May 20 to October 21, 1883. The most violent explosions happened on August 26 and 27, 1883, peaking with the third and largest explosion at 10:02 a.m. on August 27. The eruption rated VEI 6 on the scale with a force estimated to be roughly 200 megatons of TNT (about 13,000 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb). The 10:02 a.m. blast is recorded as the loudest sound ever heard on Earth, heard over 4,700 km away (as far as Australia) and registering shock waves that circled the planet seven times. Massive pyroclastic flows and the collapse of the island into an undersea caldera generated tsunamis up to 40 meters (135 feet) high. Over 36,000 people died, with the vast majority killed by the colossal tsunamis that struck coastal Java and Sumatra, wiping out 165 villages..Tons of sulfur dioxide and ash injected into the stratosphere scattered sunlight, caused global temperatures to drop by about 0.5°C to 1.2°C for several years, and created vivid red sunsets and blue moons worldwide. Over 70% of the original island was destroyed, leaving a marine caldera. Decades later, a new volcanic child cone named Anak Krakatau ("Child of Krakatoa") rose from the same area in 1927. These are actual, real photographs taken of the two of the early explosions from the Krakatoa volcano. The first photo was taken during the early phases of the volcano waking up, a passenger named Mr. Hamburg aboard the tourist ship Gouverneur Generaal Loudon managed to take an authentic photograph of the eruption column. Not sure about the source for the second photo, but it was taken from a passing ship in the Sunda Strait on August 26, 1883, it captures active smoke and ash plumes just hours before the major cataclysmic explosions.
Coral block thrown onto the shore of Java by the tsunami from the Krakatoa eruption in 1883.
Before the eruption of Krakatau in 1883, Rakata Island consisted of three volcanoes: Rakata, Banan, and Perboewatan. During the eruption of the Krakatoa caldera, two of these volcanoes were completely destroyed, leaving the third volcano split in two.
The 1883 Krakatoa eruption generated a series of catastrophic tsunamis, which were actually responsible for the vast majority of the eruption's estimated 36,000 casualties. The primary, most destructive tsunami was triggered on August 27, 1883, when the volcano's massive magma chamber emptied, causing the island to violently collapse into the ocean. Massive volumes of superheated volcanic rock and ash also plunged into the sea, rapidly displacing enormous amounts of water. The largest waves reached staggering heights of up to 135 feet (41 meters), completely destroying the coastal town of Merak in Java. The energy from the tsunamis was so immense that it registered on tide gauges thousands of miles away, including in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and even as far away as the English Channel. In the Netflix series La Palma, a Norwegian family goes on holiday to the Canary Islands when a young researcher discovers alarming signs of an imminent volcanic eruption. Cumbre Vieja is an active volcano on La Palma, which last erupted in 2021. The series culminates in a "megatsunami" capable of engulfing Europe and reaching as far as the west coast of the US. In the Netflix miniseries, the tsunami is caused by a massive volcanic flank collapse at the Cumbre Vieja volcano. Preceded by volcanic gas emissions and ash eruptions, an imminent eruption destabilizes the western side of the mountain. A huge section of the volcanic island (comparable in size to Manhattan) breaks off and plunges into the Atlantic Ocean. The massive rock slide displaces a huge volume of water, triggering a catastrophic mega-tsunami that threatens the Canary Islands and the wider Atlantic. While the plot is inspired by a real 2001 scientific hypothesis, actual volcanologists and modern studies have heavily debunked the idea of a catastrophic Atlantic-spanning mega-tsunami from Cumbre Vieja, showing that real-world collapses happen in smaller, gradual stages. It's still a terrifying scene.
A still from the film "Krakatoa, East of Java," (1969) a disaster film depicting the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia.
You can't talk about volcanic eruptions in history without mentioning the most famous of all them all, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii in 79 AD. The volcano erupted on August 24, 79 AD. The eruption started at approximately 1:00 P.M. Pyroclastic flows were the primary and final killer of the people who remained in Pompeii. While thousands of residents successfully evacuated during the initial hours of the eruption, archaeological and volcanological data indicates that approximately 62% of the victims found in Pompeii died during the pyroclastic surge phase. The death toll was divided across distinct phases of the eruption:
During the early phase, Vesuvius rained down a massive volume of pumice and ash. About 38% of the victims found in Pompeii died during this time.
• Cause of death: These individuals were largely found inside buildings. They chose to shelter indoors from the falling stones, only to be crushed when heavy accumulations of volcanic debris caused the roofs and walls to collapse.
• Earthquakes: Powerful concurrent earthquakes also triggered structural failures, pinning refugees beneath heavy stone.
The definitive blow to the city came the following morning when the towering eruption column collapsed, sending multiple waves of superheated gas, ash, and rock rushing down the volcano at hurricane speeds.
• Cause of death: Anyone still alive in the city was killed almost instantly. Recent bio-anthropological studies have altered our understanding of how they died. While scientists long believed the victims slowly suffocated on toxic ash, data shows that the pyroclastic flows reached Pompeii at temperatures between 200°C and 300°C (392°F to 572°F).
• Thermal Shock: This extreme heat triggered instant thermal shock. It knocked out vital organs and contracted muscles instantly into a "pugilist pose" (a fetal-like posture with curled limbs), leaving no time for agony or suffocation. It was this later encasement in cooling ash that formed the hollow spaces used to create the famous plaster casts. Nearby Herculaneum, which sat closer to the volcano, was hit by even hotter currents (up to 500°C/932°F), instantly vaporizing bodily tissues upon impact. Pompeii's distance allowed the flows to cool slightly, but they remained fully lethal.
You can't help but feel horrible for the ancient Romans and all victims of volcanic eruptions. The ancient Romans did not realize that Mount Vesuvius was an active volcano capable of a catastrophic eruption. Mount Vesuvius had been dormant for centuries—and hadn't experienced a major eruption in roughly 1,800 years—leaving it covered in lush vineyards, farms, and villas rather than looking like a threat. Ancient Romans had no scientific framework for "volcanoes" (the word volcano itself was later derived from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire) and did not view Mount Vesuvius as a mountain that could blow up. While some classical writers like Strabo noted that the dark rock around the peak looked "eaten by fire" or resembled volcanic stone from Sicily's Mount Etna, these observations were obscure literary or geographic notes not known or understood by ordinary citizens. The region was prone to earthquakes—including a severe tremor in 62 AD or 63 AD that heavily damaged Pompeii—but residents viewed these as routine seismic events or religious omens rather than precursors to a volcanic blast. When Mount Vesuvius finally erupted in 79 AD, the terrifying Plinian ash cloud and subsequent pyroclastic surges caught the population completely off guard. If you want to see what that day was like, this is a pretty accurate portrayal. The first time I watched this video, my heart sunk. It's like looking back in time and being in Pompeii on that fateful day. It's surreal, and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Pompeii, Italy - 79 AD and now. In under 24 hours, Mount Vesuvius buried a thriving Roman metropolis under meters of ash. Pompeii was buried for nearly 1,700 years before it was initially rediscovered, and about 1,669 years before systematic excavations officially began. The ruins were first encountered in 1599 by the architect Domenico Fontana while digging an underground water channel, though the site was not actively excavated or fully recognized at the time. In 1748, systematic, official excavations began under Spanish military engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre. In 1763, an inscription reading “Rei publicae Pompeianorum” was uncovered, officially identifying the ruins as the lost city of Pompeii.
Another overhead view of Pompeii with Mount Vesuvius looming in the background.
Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) was a prominent Roman lawyer, author, and magistrate who wrote the only surviving firsthand eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Because of his detailed descriptions, volcanologists today use the term "Plinian eruption" to describe highly explosive volcanic events characterized by massive ash columns that resemble pine trees. Pliny was 17 years old during the disaster. He was staying across the Bay of Naples at Misenum with his mother and his famous uncle, Pliny the Elder (a celebrated scholar and commander of the Roman fleet).
His connection to the event relies on two famous letters he wrote decades later to the historian Tacitus, which provide invaluable historic and scientific details:
Pliny was the first to describe the terrifying visual of the eruption column. He wrote that its shape looked most like a Mediterranean pine tree, shooting up to a great height on a massive "trunk" before splitting into dark branches. This perfectly describes the convective column of a modern volcanic explosion.
When the volcano erupted, Pliny the Elder launched Roman warships on a dual mission: to scientifically investigate the phenomenon and to rescue friends trapped at the base of Vesuvius. Pliny the Younger stayed behind to finish his studies. His uncle successfully made landfall at Stabiae but died on the beach, likely suffocated by toxic volcanic gases.
In his second letter, Pliny the Younger described the harrowing experience of fleeing Misenum as the disaster escalated. He detailed:
• Continuous, violent earthquakes that shook the carriages.
• The sea being "sucked back" from the shore (a precursor to a tsunami).
• A terrifying, dense black cloud rolling across the land like a flood, plunging the world into total darkness "like a room when the light is out."
The 2014 film Pompeii is not directly based on Pliny the Younger, but it uses his famous historical letters as the foundational blueprint for how the eruption unfolds on screen. The eruption scene in the movie Pompeii gets the broad chronological sequence of events right, including the initial earthquakes, the massive ash and pumice explosion, and the lethal pyroclastic flows (superheated avalanches of gas and rock) described by Pliny the Younger. However, it takes major Hollywood artistic liberties with specific visual and physical phenomena.
What the Movie Got Right
• Sequence of Events: It follows the general progression of the A.D. 79 disaster, moving from preliminary tremors to sky-darkening ash columns and rolling pyroclastic surges.
• City Architecture & Topography: The production used LiDAR scanning and archaeological data to accurately map out the streets, buildings, amphitheater, and layout of the ancient city.
• Volcanic Mechanics: Volcanologists noted that the film realistically captured the terrifying atmospheric and seismic buildup before the mountain collapsed.
What the Movie Got Wrong
• Flaming Lava Bombs: The film shows massive, glowing, fire-trailing "lava bombs" raining down on the streets, whereas the historical eruption mostly dropped suffocating grey pumice stones and rock debris.
• The Harbor Tsunami: It depicts a giant, inland-surging tsunami that sweeps massive seagoing ships straight into the middle of the city. While minor seismic sea-level disturbances occurred, there is no archaeological evidence of a catastrophic harbor-destroying wave of that scale.
• Pyroclastic Flow Appearance: The pyroclastic flows are styled as slow-moving walls of active flame rather than the blistering-hot, fast-moving, black-and-grey clouds of toxic ash and superheated gas that actually incinerated everything in their path.
• Timeline Compression: The film compresses days and hours of terror into a hyper-accelerated sequence where characters outrun collapsing structures and pyroclastic waves in real time.
Like I said earlier, the pryoclastic flow was the main killer in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the film Pompeii really captures just how terrifying pyroclastic flow is. Here is the famous eruption scene from the 2014 film Pompeii.
Six leaves at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, New York are all that remain of the earliest known copy of the letters of Pliny the Younger. The Letters provide fascinating insights into daily life in first-century Rome—including, most famously, Pliny’s firsthand account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 and descriptions of his dealings with the burgeoning Christian community. Although written in Italy, the manuscript survived for centuries in France, eventually forming part of the celebrated library at the Abbey of Saint Victor, near Paris. It was ‘discovered’ there by Renaissance scholars from Italy, who recognized its value as the oldest and most complete copy of Pliny’s text. They sent it to Venice, where it provided the basis for the first printed edition of the Letters in 1508. Probably as a result of this period of intense study and use, the ancient manuscript was lost, but for the fragment Pierpont Morgan acquired in 1910. This manuscript leaf is the Morgan Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger (MS M.462), held by The Morgan Library & Museum.
Mount Vesuvius as it all today. It is still an active volcano. It is currently resting in a state of quiescence (dormancy) and has not erupted since March 1944. The volcano is at a green alert level, meaning monitored parameters (such as low seismicity and stable crater temperatures) are within normal background activity. It still shows minor signs of life, including sulfur-rich steam and gas (fumaroles) venting from the crater and low-level seismic activity. The INGV – Osservatorio Vesuviano monitors the volcano 24/7 for any signs of ground deformation or changes in behavior. Because it has erupted repeatedly in history—including the famous AD 79 destruction of Pompeii and its last eruption in 1944—it is classified as active and capable of erupting again. Located near Naples in a densely populated region of Italy, it is monitored closely with emergency and evacuation plans in place.
Mount Vesuvius as seen from space.
Another great aerial view of Mount Vesuvius.
You can take a tour of Mount Vesuvius today, provided the weather and volcanic conditions are clear of orange or red weather alerts. To reach the crater of Mount Vesuvius, you must hike Nature Trail No. 5, known as Il Gran Cono, which begins at the Piazzale di Quota 1000 parking area and bus terminus. It is approximately 4 km (2.5 miles) round trip to walk up, explore a portion of the rim, and head back down. The trailhead sits at roughly 1,000 meters above sea level, and you will ascend an additional 140 to 175 meters (approx. 500–580 feet) to reach the highest public section of the rim at 1,175 meters. It typically takes 25 to 45 minutes of steady uphill walking to reach the rim, and about 1.5 to 2 hours total for the entire round trip. The route consists of steep, dusty switchbacks along a wide path. The surface is made of loose volcanic gravel, ash, pumice, and lapilli. This can make the ground slippery and slide under your feet, particularly on the descent. The entire trail is completely exposed to the elements with absolutely no shade. The bottom photo shows a visitor standing right above the crater at the top.
A view inside the crater at the top, you can see steam on the right hand side of the third photo from the volcano still being active. Visitors are not allowed to go inside or descend into the crater of Mount Vesuvius. The crater is roughly 300 meters (about 985 to 1,000 feet) deep, and public entry into the interior bowl is strictly prohibited for safety and preservation reasons.
Another view inside the crater. I have to say, it would be surreal and humbling to stand at the top of Mount Vesuvius and look down inside that crater, where all hell broke loose in 79 AD.
The process of making plaster casts of the Pompeii victims was discovered and developed in 1863 by the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli. While excavating the ancient site, Giuseppe Fiorelli noticed empty cavities in the hardened volcanic ash where organic remains had decomposed beneath the layers from the 79 AD Mount Vesuvius eruption. He realized these hollow spaces preserved the exact shapes of the bodies. He began pouring a liquid mixture of plaster of Paris (and sometimes glue) directly into the small openings of these voids. Once the plaster hardened, the surrounding volcanic material was carefully chipped away, revealing a detailed, lifelike form of the victim in their final posture, complete with clothing folds and facial expressions. The plaster casts of the Pompeii victims are famous because they turn abstract ancient history into a visceral, human moment, preserving the exact body positions, facial expressions, and clothing folds of people trapped by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. Unlike typical skeletal remains, the casts capture dynamic, haunting details—such as families huddling together, people trying to shield their faces, clothing textures, footwear, and even facial expressions at the moment of death. These are not hollow statues; many of the casts encase the actual original bones, teeth, and jewelry of the ancient residents inside the plaster shell. By shortening the temporal distance of nearly 2,000 years, the casts allow modern humans to look directly into the personal tragedy of the individuals. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii in 79 AD is one of the most famous and tragic events in ancient history. It has been portrayed over and over again in books, documentaries, cinema, but to see the actual ancient Romans who lived and died that day in Pompeii in 79 AD up close, in their final moments as the volcano erupted almost 2,000 years ago, it simply cannot be put into words.
Let's look at Pompeii today, beautiful ancient city. The image shows the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius in Campania, Italy. The city surrounding the ancient ruins in this picture is the modern town of Pompei (spelled with a single "i" in Italian to distinguish it from the ancient site, which is spelled Pompeii). The modern municipality is located in the Metropolitan City of Naples, within the Campania region of Italy. The ancient ruins sit right alongside this living, thriving town of roughly 24,000 residents, all situated right under the slopes of the prominent Mount Vesuvius seen in the background.
An up-close view of the ruins at Pompeii.