June 22, 1783: Icelandic Volcano Disrupts Europe's Economy

1783: Ash from the Laki volcano in Iceland arrives in Britain and northern France. It will linger for months, creating a hot summer, a very cold winter and thousands of deaths. Laki began erupting June 8. It produced the largest lava flow in historic times when a fissure 16 miles long sent a flow of […]

__1783: __Ash from the Laki volcano in Iceland arrives in Britain and northern France. It will linger for months, creating a hot summer, a very cold winter and thousands of deaths.

Laki began erupting June 8. It produced the largest lava flow in historic times when a fissure 16 miles long sent a flow of pahoehoe (fast-moving, smooth or ropy lava) more than 40 miles, The 2.9 cubic miles of lava covered 218 square miles.

Fluorine gas fell to the land as hydrofluoric acid in Iceland, dissolving the flesh off livestock. Fully half the horses and cattle, as well as three-quarters of the sheep died. Famine set in, the social order broke down and looting was rampant. Eventually, a quarter of Iceland's people died of starvation.

Sulfur dioxide gas released by the eruption traveled farther, arriving in Britain and the Continent on June 22. Throughout Europe a heavy haze filtered the sun, and a "dry fog" sat on the land. Sulfur dioxide poisoning and excess heat caused scores of thousands of deaths.

British cleric Gilbert White recorded the misery:

The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phaenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man....

[T]he wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting.

All the time the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun

The hot summer was followed by a long, cold winter: one of the worst on record in both Europe and North America. The Mississippi River froze as far south as New Orleans. Much of the Northern Hemisphere was 4 to 9 degrees (Fahrenheit) below normal. Siberia and Alaska had their coldest summer in half a millennium. Crop failure and famine were reported everywhere.

Iceland alone lost about 9,300 people, but the eventual global death toll may well have been 10 times that … or more.

With that in mind, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull eruption of earlier this year, which severely disrupted airline schedules, doesn't seem half-bad.

Source: Various

Photo: Iceland's Laki volcano still wears a sulfurous coat to this day./Juhász Péter

Expanded from an Aug. 21, 2008, Wired.com article.

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