commentary
Eruption politics
Clive Oppenheimer
The impact of a volcanic eruption depends on more than just its size. We need more interdisciplinary
research to understand the global societal consequences of past and future volcanic eruptions.
A
volcanic eruption does not
have to be large to have global
consequences: the ash clouds from
Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland in 2010 are a case
in point. The event was modest by volcanic
standards — magnitude 4 according to the
quantity of erupted material — yet caused
enormous disruption to global aviation for
several days, with substantial economic
costs. The impacts that might attend much
larger eruptions in the future present an
uncomfortable open question, following
that experience.
Huge strides have been made in
understanding the atmospheric and
climatic effects of volcanism since the
1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the
Philippines. Similarly, there has been a
surge in multidisciplinary research over
the past 15 years into the complexity of
risk management where it concerns local
populations living on or close to volcanoes.
© BPK
Figure 1 | Bavarian riots of 1819. A wave of famine-induced protests and violence spread through Europe
in the years following the Tambora eruption.
244 NATURE GEOSCIENCE | VOL 8 | APRIL 2015 | www.nature.com/naturegeoscience
However, much less work has focused on
understanding the very long-range societal
impacts of great eruptions. Expertise in
volcanology and climate science is not
sufficient to identify ways of mitigating
the global-scale impacts of future
volcanic catastrophes: only a partnership
between a range of fields that includes the
geosciences, as well as social and political
sciences, can tackle the problem.
Sifting through speculation
Although the connection between
Eyjafjallajökull’s eruption and the ensuing
week of aviation chaos is irrefutable,
cause–effect claims made for other past
eruptions are much harder to validate.
In popular literature, volcanism has been
implicated as the trigger for a number
of turning points in world history. For
instance, it has been suggested that the
Dark Ages were ushered in by eruption-
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
induced climate change circa 536 (ref. 1);
that the 1883 outburst of Krakatoa in
Indonesia represents a link in a chain
of events that explains some present-
day religious extremism in Indonesia2;
and that the 1783 eruption of Laki in
Iceland triggered the French revolution3.
Some of these arguments probably take
environmental history too far.
But for one of the largest historical
volcanic eruptions — approaching
magnitude 7 — a compelling case
for global economic, political and
demographic repercussions has been
made repeatedly: that of Mount Tambora
in Indonesia in 1815. The Tambora
eruption has been the subject of books4,5
that recapitulate and embellish arguments
from earlier texts, among them the classic
monograph by the banker and historian
John Post in 1977 (ref. 6). Post, in turn,
drew on studies of extreme cold summers
and poor harvests in 1816 and 1817 (for
example, ref. 7) and of the links between
large volcanic eruptions and global-scale
climatic perturbations8. But crucially,
he set his argument for long-range
repercussions of the Tambora eruption in
the context of the calamity of global war.
The case is persuasive.
Antecedent factors
Tambora’s paroxysm began, after a week or
so of precursory activity, on the evening of
10 April 1815. Explosions fed soaring ash
clouds and prodigious ground-hugging
pyroclastic density currents. Many
settlements were engulfed, immediately
claiming an estimated 10,000 lives and
leaving few eyewitnesses. One survivor, a
local village chief, later described a ‘violent
whirlwind’ that knocked down almost
every house in his kampung, tore up trees
by the roots, and tossed them together with
men, horses and cattle into the air 9.
This testimony was recorded by an
emissary of Sir Stamford Raffles, then
the Lieutenant Governor of British Java.
Four years earlier, following the defeat of
the Kingdom of Holland by Napoleon,
the Dutch East Indies had come under

French administration, eliciting a swift
and decisive assault by the British navy.
It is the depredations of the Napoleonic
Wars in Europe — coincident with the
global climate change wrought by the
eruption — that underpin claims that
Tambora changed the world.
Assorted meteorological and
palaeoclimatic data show that cold
summers and short growing seasons
prevailed across large parts of North
America and Europe in 1816 and 1817.
These regional anomalies are now seen as
typical reflections of the climate forcing
of large, sulphur-rich volcanic clouds,
especially those sourced at low latitudes
and globally dispersed. As attested by many
accounts in contemporary diaries and
newspapers, harvests were meagre under
Tambora’s stratospheric aerosol veil and
grain prices doubled on both sides of the
Atlantic between 1815 and 1817 (ref. 6).
In the wake of a decade of war-induced
social, economic and demographic
upheaval, the hikes in grain prices affected
millions. Some people took to the streets in
mass protests. In parts of eastern England,
rioters rampaged demanding ‘bread or
blood’ and committed numerous acts of
arson and sabotage. The civil unrest was
met with a heavy-handed, and in some
cases lethal, response from the authorities.
In the following years, typhus epidemics
broke out in several parts of Europe. A
doctor at Belfast’s Fever Hospital estimated
that 800,000 people were infected in
Ireland, of whom more than 44,000
perished from “the joint ravages of famine,
dysentry, and fever”10, which he linked
to the poor harvest of 1816. Between
1816 and 1817, mortality increased by
4% in France, 6% in Prussia, and over
20% in Switzerland and Tuscany, where
many starved to death6. The famine led to
heightened political and social tensions
in continental Europe. Anti-Semitic
protests erupted in Würzburg, Bavaria,
in August 1819 (Fig. 1) and the violence
spread, reaching Copenhagen, Amsterdam
and Krakow.
In France, price controls were
introduced to alleviate the famine, and
these at least kept bread affordable
in the cities. Administrations in both
Britain and France also raised funds to
import food from Russia and the Baltic,
but elsewhere such welfare reforms
vanished amidst the social unrest and
an upsurge in conservative opinion and
more repressive policies6. Post saw these
political manifestations as the final link
in a sequence of events provoked by the
climate-modifying effects of Tambora’s
stratospheric dust 6.
NATURE GEOSCIENCE | VOL 8 | APRIL 2015 | www.nature.com/naturegeoscience 245
A step too far?
Many additional ramifications of the
Tambora eruption have been suggested. For
example, some claim that the food crisis
in Europe, which led to the death of many
horses, triggered the invention of the bicycle
as an alternative form of transport. It has
been argued that the eruption’s climate
forcing altered China’s monsoon season,
causing flooding, and that cold summers
decimated rice crops in Yunnan province,
prompting a shift to more profitable opium
production and fuelling the emergent
international trade in illicit drugs5. In
contrast to the cold, eruption-induced
warming in the Arctic briefly opened up
parts of the Arctic Ocean. Some argue
this enticed the British, eager to be first to
navigate the Northwest Passage, to embark
on what would prove to be three decades
of thwarted exploration, culminating in
tragedy for the Franklin expedition5.
Such claims beg the question of what
counts as history and what counts as
speculation and coincidence. Although the
arguments may seem plausible, so many
antecedent factors come into play that
they are not necessarily tenable. Much has
been said on this topic in the context of
explaining societal collapse11. To suggest,
for instance, that British exploration of the
Arctic proliferated because of the Tambora
eruption is tantamount to arguing that it
would not have done so had the eruption
not occurred. Counter-factual history tends
to downplay or overlook other significant
factors and has been rightly challenged
by historians12. In the case of the Arctic
expeditions, the fact that Britain had the
best navy in the world at the end of the
Napoleonic Wars but no one to wage war
against left it with a lot of spare capacity
for exploration. We have to approach each
conjunction of volcanic eruption and
long-range societal change by assessing
elements of chance and the historical (socio-
economic, cultural, global) forces to reach
an explanation that makes sense12.
Volcanic catastrophe risk
Global population today is six times greater
than when Tambora exploded; societies
worldwide have become more complex
and more interdependent. Future great
eruptions will pose severe challenges for
risk managers13. As the ash-cloud threats to
aviation have shown, even modest eruptions
can have significant impacts on the global
economy. Tambora-scale events — in terms
of either sulphur or tephra output — may
have a return period of around 500 years.
Great eruptions are rare, but the chances of
the next one occurring within a few decades
or so cannot be dismissed.
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
commentary
Thanks to hundreds of studies following
the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo,
we have developed a sophisticated
understanding of the Earth system
response to volcanic forcing. Enough is
known to surmise that the climatic effects
of the next Tambora-class eruption might
have profound consequences for grain
supply. Past global food crises, such as
those in 2007–2008 and 2010–2011, have
been implicated in increased civil unrest
and conflict at a large scale14. Although
such links are controversial, modelling
capabilities should already enable
exploration of potential ramifications
of future magnitude 7 eruptions for
food security.
It is essential to incorporate complex
economic and socio-political factors
into our strategies for volcanic disaster
risk reduction. This merger will
require input from physical and social
scientists working in fields as diverse as
geoscience, economics, politics, history
and anthropology. Needless to say, such
collaboration won’t stop volcanoes from
erupting, but it could inform contingency
planning. In addition, continued forensic,
interdisciplinary studies of past eruptions
will surely reveal further fascinating
insights into the rich human ecology of
extreme events15. ❐
Clive Oppenheimer is in the Department
of Geography, University of Cambridge,
Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK.
e-mail: co200@cam.ac.uk
References
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Modern World (Ballantine Books, 1999).
2. Winchester, S. Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded
(Penguin, 2004).
3. Witze, A. & Kanipe, J. Island on Fire: the Extraordinary Story
of Laki, the Forgotten Volcano that Turned Eighteenth-Century
Europe Dark (Profile Books, 2014).
4. Klingaman, W. K. & Klingaman, N. P. The Year Without Summer:
1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed
History (Macmillan, 2013).
5. Wood, G. D. A. Tambora: the Eruption that Changed the World
(Princeton Univ. Press, 2014).
6. Post, J. D. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World
(Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977).
7. Hoyt, J. B. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 48, 118–131 (1958).
8. Lamb, H. H. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A 266, 425–533 (1970).
9. Raffles, S. Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas
Stamford Raffles, F. R. S., Particularly in the Government
of Java 1811–1816, and of Bencoolen and its Dependencies
1817–1824: With Details of the Commerce and Resources of the
Eastern Archipelago, and Selections from his Correspondence
(John Murray, 1830).
10. Harty, W. An Historic Sketch of the Causes, Progress, Extent, and
Mortality of the Contagious Fever Epidemic in Ireland During the
Years 1817, 1818 and 1819 (Royal Geographical Society, 1820).
11. Evans, R. J. ‘What if ’ is a waste of time. The Guardian
(13 March 2014); http://go.nature.com/dx77p5
12. Butzer, K. W. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, E2032–E2032 (2012).
13. Donovan, A. & Oppenheimer, C. J. Geophys. Res.
117, B03214 (2012).
14. Hsiang, S. M., Burke, M. & Miguel, E. Science 341, 6151 (2013).
15. Oppenheimer, C. Eruptions that Shook the World (Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2011).