8. History’s Deadliest Volcano
The Laki Eruption’s deadliest impact was in Europe and the northern hemisphere southeast of Iceland. The summer of 1783 had been a particularly hot one, and a rare high-pressure zone formed over Iceland that year, which caused winds to blow to the southeast. Thus, when Laki began spewing prodigious amounts of sulfuric dioxide into the sky, they were carried by the winds from Iceland in a southeasterly direction.
Wherever those winds arrived, they brought misery with them. Laki’s gasses caused crop failures in Europe, drought in North Africa and India, Japan’s worst famine, as well as a historic famine in Egypt, a sixth of whose population starved to death in 1784. It is estimated that the Laki Eruption and its aftermath caused the deaths of an estimated six million people, making it the deadliest volcanic eruption in human history. It also illustrated how low energy but large volume eruptions over an extended period can have a greater impact than massive explosive eruptions.