Tambora Explosion

In 1815, on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, a handsome and long-quiescent mountain named Tambora exploded spectacularly, killing a hundred thousand people with its blast and associated tsunamis. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in ten thousand years, 150 times the size of Mount St. Helens, equivalent to sixty thousand Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. The news didn't travel terribly fast in those days. In London, The Times ran a small story, actually a letter from a merchant, seven months after the event. But by this time Tambora's effects were already being felt. Thirty-six cubic miles of smoky ash, dust, and grit had diffused through the atmosphere, obscuring the Sun's rays and causing the Earth to cool. Sunsets were unusually but blearily colourful, an effect memorably captured by the artist ... M W Turner, who could not have been happier, but mostly the world existed under an oppressive, dusky pall. This deathly dimness inspired the Byron lines above.