During the summer of 1816, unexpected climate changes left countries in the Northern Hemisphere suffering from devastating famine and epidemic outbreaks. These weather patterns were the result of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Sumbawa, Indonesia, on 10 April 1815.

How did this catastrophe affect the rest of the world?

Switzerland, 1816
More grass for you, sir?
The famine was so serious that the Swiss government declared a state of emergency. It also issued information on how to distinguish poisonous plants from edible ones to prevent people from indiscriminately consuming any plant that they found. During the 'year without Summer', the starving Swiss people resorted to eating moss.

Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 1816
A horror of a Summer
English author Mary Shelley, while vacationing at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, was inspired by the miserable weather to write the classic Gothic novel Frankenstein. Holidaying at the same cabin as Mary Shelley in 1816, John Polidori wrote the novel The Vampyre, which later inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

France, 1816
Bubbly no more
The grapes in the Champagne district of Verdun froze in the cold summer and never ripened. Vineyards across France suffered a similar fate. Only a few grapes ripened in the autumn months. The 1816 grape harvest of France was practically non-existent due to the cold summer.

Ireland, May-September 1816
Rain, rain go away
Ireland experienced persistent cold rain for 142 of the 153 summer days. These moist conditions were later blamed for the European typhus epidemic of 1816-1819. Ireland suffered its first ever famine in the 'year without Summer', when the cold weather destroyed its wheat, oat and potato crops.

Hungary, January 1816
Brown snow?
In January 1816, a blizzard of brown snow hit Hungary. Described as 'flesh-coloured', the snow’s unusual colour was the result of mixing with the volcanic dust from Mount Tambora. In the spring of 1816, Hungary and Italy experienced brown and yellow snow respectively.

Britain, Autumn 1815
Red, red sun
Sulphur aerosols resulting from Mount Tambora’s eruption scattered the red wavelengths of sunlight. English artist JMW Turner, 'the painter of light', observed brilliantly red sunrises and sunsets in the autumn of 1815 and used them as inspiration for his paintings. In response to the food shortage caused by the 'year without Summer', the British government abolished income taxes in 1816.

Germany, 1816
A cheaper ride
The famine inflated grain prices. In an attempt to develop horseless transportation, thereby saving on the cost of oats to feed the animals, German aristocrat Karl Drais invented the draisine, a predecessor of the bicycle. Starving Germans baked straw and sawdust to eat as 'bread'.

Salem, Massachusetts, 5 June 1816
Swing high, swing low
There were extreme temperature swings within the span of hours. Salem saw a day that started hot with a temperature of 32ºC, faced thunderous showers in the afternoon and ended 27ºC lower than it had begun. The 1816 summer months of Salem experienced an average temperature that was 2.5-7.0ºC lower than previous its summers.

Erie Canal, New York, 1817
Moving to the country
Crop failures prompted New England farmers to migrate to the warmer mid-west. Construction of the 584km long Erie Canal was accelerated in 1817 to aid this mass migration. The crop failures of the 'year without Summer' forced the family of Mormon founder Joseph Smith to move from Vermont to New York.

Seven Oaks, Canada, June 1816
Food fight
The food shortage in Canada aggravated a trade dispute over pemmican, a concentrate of meat, berries and fat, between Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company. This triggered the 1816 Battle of Seven Oaks. Twenty-four people died. The first recorded experience of an unusual climatic change in 1816 was in southern Quebec, where frost and cold waves appeared in early May.

China, 1816
Wet, wet, wet
The cold weather killed trees, rice crops and even water buffalo, especially in northern China. Floods destroyed any remaining crops. Mount Tambora’s eruption disrupted China’s monsoon season, resulting in overwhelming floods in the Yangtze Valley in 1816.

India, 1816
The cholera epidemic
The cooler climate delayed India’s summer monsoon. This brought late torrential rains that aggravated the spread of cholera from a region near the River Ganges in Bengal to as far as Moscow. The famine of 1816 weakened people’s resistance, making them more susceptible to disease. This propagated a cholera epidemic in Europe.