Cover of Tambora

Tambora

by Gillen D'Arcy Wood

312 pages · History · Finished Sep 12, 2026

A global history of the climate catastrophe caused by the Tambora eruption When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano’s massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale. Here, Gillen D’Arcy Wood traces Tambora’s global and historical reach: how the volcano’s three-year climate change regime initiated the first worldwide cholera pandemic, expanded opium markets in China, and plunged the United States into its first economic depression. Bringing the history of this planetary emergency to life, Tambora sheds light on the fragile interdependence of climate and human societies to offer a cautionary tale about the potential tragic impacts of drastic climate change in our own century.

My posts about this book

Finished reading: Tambora by Gillen D'Arcy Wood 📚

Finished reading: Tambora by Gillen D’Arcy Wood 📚

I can’t recommend this book to the casual reader, but if you read Krakatoa and enjoyed it, and you are a history buff who wants to understand the effects of the Tambora volcanic eruption which was far worse than the better-known 1883 explosion of Krakatoa you will enjoy this book.

The worldwide effects of Tambora are hard to believe. The worldwide hunger and disease this eruption caused are mind-numbing to read about. Along with climate change, nuclear war, and fascism, you can add to your fears a major volcanic eruption that can slowly end life as we know it.

Book Quotes

For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry.

This giant volcanic sinkhole is among the largest to have formed on Earth since the retreat of the last glacial period around twelve thousand years ago and is comparable in size to the volcanic Crater Lake in Oregon, formed seven thousand years ago.

It is important to remember that the misery of the Tambora period in Europe—years of famine, disease, and homelessness—was borne overwhelmingly by the poor, who left scant record of their sufferings.

In terms of sheer numbers of victims, louse-borne typhus has not only been decisive in the outcome of major military conflicts during the last five hundred years, it has in that time “killed more people than all conflicts combined.”

Despite the impression of Olympian serenity he presented to visitors, Jefferson experienced the Tambora-driven economic crisis of those post-1816 years in a sickening spiral of indebtedness that culminated in the great personal humiliation of his old age: the mortgaging of his beloved Monticello.

The eruption of Tambora was thus responsible for far more than a single summerless year in New England. By precipitating violent short-term fluctuations in the price of grain in the transatlantic region, the Tamboran weather of 1815–18 was a primary cause of the United States’ first major economic depression.

Tambora’s history, then, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ultimately tells a cautionary tale. Both warn against the technological hubris of our modernity through figures of intense and widespread suffering. “All men hate the wretched,” laments the Creature, Shelley’s literary projection of the homeless, starving poor of Europe in Tambora’s aftermath. Two centuries on, the global ranks of the wretched are set to increase exponentially in coming decades at the hands of our own climate “Frankenstein,” a monster who feeds on carbon waste and grows more violent by the year. Failure to draw down the carbon emissions and rampant deforestation that drive climate change brings us ever closer to the traumatized world of 1815–18 writ large.