Rebecca Writes

When I was a child I read a novel that mentioned a year in the 1800s when there was no summer. I read a book a day at that time and they all blend together, so you can’t expect me to remember a title. What I’ve never forgotten, however, is that there really was a year without a summer.

I imagined a year with snow cover all year round, when people ice skated on frozen lakes in July. That wasn’t exactly the way it was, but 1816 was an unusual weather year. There was a snowstorm that dumped 4 inches of snow in New England in the middle of June, and there was frost overnight for several days in a row in both July and August. In between those extraordinary occurrences, there was fairly normal summer weather, but the frosts caused crop failure in the northeastern US and eastern Canada.

In Europe, there was almost constant cold, wet gloom, and crop failures, too. In Ireland, it rained for 142 of the summer days, causing a famine. There was no grape harvest in France and no grain harvest in Germany. 

Historians blame the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia the year before. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history, and all those ash particles in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere were bound to cause big changes in the weather.

Not everything was bad. There were brilliantly colourful sunrises and sunsets, which some say inspired the intense glowing depictions of the sun on the horizon in the paintings of the British impressionist painter J.M.W. Turner. You see an example in Turner’s painting of Flint Castle above, and another in one of his nautical paintings, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up.

According to oral tradition, here in the Yukon there was a year in the 1800s with no summer, when people starved, too. In the 1970s, it was described by Yukon elder Rachel Dawson as occurring over one hundred years previous to her time.

Two winters joined together. No snow, but there was ice all over, and the winters were joined together. 

There are variations to the story, and it’s impossible to pin down exactly when it was. Perhaps it was 1816, when the Tambora volcano wreaked widespread havoc, or maybe it was either 1845, 1849, or 1850, when tree ring measurement shows very little growth.

But it all goes to show that in the weather realm, strange things can happen anywhere and anytime.

What I’m waiting for is the year with no winter. Of course, if that happened, they’d probably chalk it up, rightly or wrongly, to global warming, wouldn’t they?