3. The Tambora eruption was the largest in over two millennia
In 2010 an Icelandic volcano with the unfortunate name of Eyjafjallajokull (the name means “ice cap”) erupted with sufficient force to create an ash cloud that for several weeks disrupted aviation in Europe and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. That eruption was given a Volcanic Explosion Activity Index score (roughly equivalent to a Richter Scale rating for earthquakes as comparative rating) of 4. Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and preserved it for history with an eruption which earned a 5. Tambora in 1815 was rated a 7, and due to the method of calculation, the rating means that the April 1815 disaster was more than 1,000 times more powerful than the 2010 Icelandic eruption. It was the deadliest volcanic eruption in human history, with records of the human toll left behind by officers of the British Navy and Empire, which include the horrific casualties from the tsunamis which ensued.
For those Americans who heard of the disaster, men of scientific minds and curiosity, the eruption was an interesting phenomenon. Yet no one of the day was capable of predicting the ongoing disaster which the volcano would create the following summer, nor the economic calamity which would follow. The United States in the spring of 1816 was an agricultural society, with fewer than 7% residing in the cities, still for the most part concentrated along the east coast. Farm products fed American society at its tables, as well as American trade. Tobacco and cotton in the south were cash crops on which their planters relied for income, in the north and growing west wheat and corn became flour and whiskey, both traded liberally with European partners. America was just beginning to build roads and canals to move agricultural products to the eastern cities, from whence they could be moved overseas. America’s economy, just emerging from a costly war, was dependent on the farm.