Picture this: It’s April 1815, and Napoleon Bonaparte is probably having the worst year of his life. He’s been exiled, escaped, rallied his troops, and now he’s marching toward Waterloo. But here’s the thing—his doom wasn’t just sealed by Wellington’s tactics or Blücher’s timely arrival. Nope. A volcano on the other side of the planet had already written his obituary.
When a Mountain in Indonesia Decides to Ruin Everyone’s Year Including Yours
Mount Tambora erupted on April 10, 1815, with the force of roughly 800 megatons of TNT. That’s about 50,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The eruption killed an estimated 71,000 people immediately—some from the blast itself, others from tsunamis that ripped across nearby islands. But wait—maybe the real carnage hadn’t even started yet.
The volcano ejected 160 cubic kilometers of rock, ash, and aerosols into the stratosphere.
Those aerosols, particularly sulfur dioxide, formed a veil around Earth that reflected sunlight back into space. Global temperatures dropped by about 0.4 to 0.7 degrees Celsius. Doesn’t sound like much? Tell that to the farmers in Europe who watched their crops fail spectacularly in 1816, the “Year Without a Summer.” Snow fell in June across New England. Frost killed crops in July. Famine spread like a particularly enthusiastic plague across the Northern Hemisphere, and food riots broke out from Ireland to Switzerland.
The Part Where Napoleon’s Cavalry Gets Stuck in Volcanic Mud That Isn’t Even Volcanic
Turns out, Tambora’s atmospheric tantrums created bizarre weather patterns across Europe throughout 1815. Unprecedented rainfall turned the fields of Belgium into swamps by June. When Napoleon faced Wellington at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, the ground was so waterlogged that he delayed his attack by several hours, hoping the mud would dry. It didn’t. His cavalry charges—normally devastating—floundered. Horses stumbled. Cannons sank. Artillery wheels got stuck in muck that had no buisness being there in summer.
Some historians argue this delay gave Blücher’s Prussian forces time to arrive and tip the scales.
Napoleon lost. His empire collapsed. All because a mountain 11,000 miles away decided to have a really bad day nine weeks earlier.
The Ripple Effect That Keeps Rippling Until Everything’s Terrible
The famine that followed Tambora’s eruption killed an estimated 100,000 people in Europe alone. In Ireland, the failed harvests contributed to a typhus epidemic. In Switzerland, the government declared a national emergency. Grain prices skyrocketed—wheat costs in England doubled between 1815 and 1817. People ate cats, dogs, and in some desperate cases, moss scraped from rocks.
Meanwhile, in North America, the cold snap destroyed crops from Canada to Virginia, food prices tripled, and tens of thousands of farmers abandoned New England entirely, migrating westward in what became one of the largest internal migrations in early American history.
The Silver Lining That’s Actually Just More Weird Weather and Also Frankenstein
Here’s where it gets deliciously ironic: That same miserable summer of 1816 trapped a group of writers indoors at Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Among them? Mary Shelley, who passed the dreary, storm-lashed days writing a little novel called “Frankenstein.” Lord Byron penned his poem “Darkness,” a apocalyptic vision inspired by the sunless skies. The eruption’s atmospheric effects also created spectacular sunsets—vivid reds and oranges caused by light scattering through volcanic aerosols. These sunsets appear in paintings by J.M.W. Turner and other artists of the period, their canvases inadvertently documenting Tambora’s lingering atmospheric signature.
So Napoleon got defeated partly because of volcanic mud, hundreds of thousands starved, but hey—we got Frankenstein and some pretty paintings out of it. That’s the planet’s version of a consolation prize, I guess.
