Forgotten Disasters: Two Supervolcanoes Cause Coldest Decade In Centuries
The decade from 1810 to 1819 is considered by climate scientists to be the coldest average decade since before the European discovery of America. It turns out that it was an unusually volcanically active time, as it was host to six massive volcanic eruptions in seven years.
The coldest year of the decade, 1816, is known to historians as the “Year without a Summer,” and is believed to have been triggered by the 1815 eruption of Indonesian volcano Mt. Tambora, which killed 88,000 people. Temperatures reached fatal lows, agriculture around the globe was paltry and caused prices for basic staples to soar, and thin fog now believed to be sulfuric aerosols persisted for months in hundreds of cities around the world.
Source: Wahoo Art
However, the records show that the global climate first got unusually cold in 1810, two years before the next known volcanic event. Recently, climate scientists have discovered evidence that a previously unknown supervolcano in Greenland erupted in 1809 with about half the force of Tambora. Massive eruptions began occurring about once a year until culminating in the catastrophic Tambora eruption that would cool the earth for three more years.
Forgotten Disasters: Donora Killer
Source: The Boston Globe
Back before environmentalism was even a conceivable common cause, the small town of Donora, Pennsylvania fell under a deadly smog. While steel mill-stemmed metallurgical air pollution was common in Donora and the surrounding towns, it normally caused little distress to the townsfolk. Due to an uncharacteristic cold front in the autumn of 1948, the pollution was trapped by a higher layer of warm air, turning the little town into a sauna of caustic gases that would last for five days until a Halloween rain cleared the air.
Twenty people died of asphyxiation in those first five days, and another thirty would die of complications in the weeks to follow. Hundreds of wild and domesticated animals would be reported killed, and over half of Donora’s population of 14,000 would be diagnosed with permanent heart and lung damage. US Steel, who owned the plants, never accepted blame for the incident, and settled a damages case with 80 plaintiffs at a fraction of the demands. Awareness of pollution’s hazards, however, had finally hit home with many Americans, and ultimately led to the passing of the Clean Air Act and, some decades later, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
