Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. It was set The attack was an utter failure. Fidel Castro had been a concern to U. That same day, the new car also debuted in Ford showrooms across America and almost 22, Mustangs were immediately snapped up by buyers. Named for a As the major Allied offensive masterminded by Robert Nivelle was failing miserably on the Western Front, British forces in Palestine make their second attempt to capture the city of Gaza from the Ottoman army on April 17, In the wake of the failed British assault on Gaza On April 17, , French General Henri Giraud, who was captured in , escapes from a castle prison at Konigstein by lowering himself down the castle wall and jumping on board a moving train, which takes him to the French border.
On April 17, , U. Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash commandeers over half a ton of uranium at Strassfurt, Germany, in an effort to prevent the Soviets from developing an A-bomb.
Pash was head of the Alsos Group, organized to search for German scientists in the postwar Live TV. They have studied how debris from the volcano shrouded and chilled parts of the planet for many months, contributing to crop failure and famine in North America and epidemics in Europe. The eruption of Tambora was ten times more powerful than that of Krakatau, which is miles away.
But Krakatau is more widely known, partly because it erupted in , after the invention of the telegraph, which spread the news quickly. Word of Tambora traveled no faster than a sailing ship, limiting its notoriety. In my 40 years of geological work I had never heard of Tambora until a couple of years ago when I started researching a book on enormous natural disasters.
So when the chance arose to visit the volcano while on a trip last fall to Bali and other Spice Islands, I took it. But researchers who have studied the volcano encouraged me. That was all I needed to hear. The parched terrain was like savanna, covered with tall grasses and only a few trees.
A few hours west of Bima, the huge bulk of Tambora begins to dominate the horizon. We camped a third of the way up the mountain, and set out at dawn for the summit, wending around boulders the size of small cars that were tossed like pebbles from the erupting volcano nearly two centuries ago. Our guide, Rahim, chose a trail that switched back and forth for about four miles.
The day was warm and humid, the temperature in the 70s. Grasses in places were charred black, burned by hunters in pursuit of deer. I was excited to approach the site of one of the most important geological events since human beings first walked the planet. Yet as I looked up at the mountain, I realized I had another purpose in mind. Tambora is classified by specialists as Ultraplinian, the most violent of all categories of volcanic eruption, named in honour of the Younger Pliny's description of the destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius in AD Such eruptions propel quantities of sulphurous gases into the stratosphere, where they combine with water vapour to create 'aerosol' clouds of drops of sulphuric acid.
The Tambora eruption caused unusual phenomena around the globe. In the north-eastern United States in the spring and summer of the sunlight was dimmed and reddened by periods of fog, which wind and rain did not disperse. It was described as a kind of aerosol veil. London experienced spectacular sunsets at the turn of June and July, which are thought to have influenced paintings by Turner. The following year brought far more damaging effects, with serious consequences for climate and the fertility of the land over much of the world, as global temperatures dropped.
In mid-June Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and two other friends were staying at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland when the weather was so repellently rainy and foggy that they were trapped indoors. Byron suggested that they pass the time by each writing a horror story and that was when Mary Shelley began to create Frankenstein. In Canada the Quebec area had deep snow.
The year following the eruption was known as The Year Without A Summer , where average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped a full degree Fahrenheit due to the resulting dust that was spewed high into the atmosphere. The volcanic winter also caused crop failures , food shortages, and flooding for most of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.
According to historical climatological sources , the death toll of the event was 11, from pyroclastic flows and more than , from the resulting food shortages over the following decade. This satellite, the first unit of the Japan Meteorological Agency's JMA third-generation of geostationary satellites, provides visible light and infrared images of the Asia-Pacific region.
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