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The history of natural disasters is peppered with storms, floods, and even asteroids, but some of the most fascinating disasters have come from deep within the Earth itself thanks to volcanoes. Eruptions like the one that buried Pompeii, Italy, are prominently featured in grade school history lessons, but few volcanoes had such a dramatic and devastating impact as that of Mount Tambora. This volcano produced such a violent eruption in 1815 that it shielded the Earth from the sun's radiation, cooling the Northern Hemisphere and making 1816 “the year without a summer.”
Before it blew in April 1815, Tambora was a 14,000-foot peak at the
center of an Indonesian island named Sumbawa. During the eruption, the
volcano ejected billions of tons of gas and debris into the atmosphere.
Much of the heavier ash and debris fell on the islands and sea around
Tambora, but a significant amount wound up in the atmosphere, spreading
around the world and partially blotting out the sun for months after the
event. The eruption itself killed tens of thousands—if not hundreds of
thousands—of people in the resulting pyroclastic flows, choking
ashfalls, and tsunamis....<<<Read More>>>...