The Year Without Summer

"The Year Without Summer", also known as the mini ice age, was a beyond average event that caused suffering to millions of North Americans and Europeans because of the decrease in global temperatures by about 2-6 degrees that quite literally never allowed for the usual hot weather to arrive in the summer months of 1816. The trigger to this odd year was  Mountain Tambora, a stratovolcano and the highest mountain on the island of Sumbawa  in Indonesia. This mountain erupted on April 1815, shooting columns of dust, ash, and gas that shadowed over the earth and cooled it in just a few months. This eruption also coincided with a sunspot minimum further causing the troposphere to cool down. The weather remaining cold all year led to failed crops, which took a even harder toll on a human population that was already a majority of farmers, near- famine conditions, and overall freezing many people to death. The weather in the year of 1816 caused events from freezing lakes in Pennsylvania in July and dropping frozen dead birds from the sky to having influence over the creations of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the modern bicycle.