More Is Never Enough What had baffled New Englanders was eventually explained by
Earth’s geology. The event had started deep beneath the planet’s crust,
where temperatures reach , 00 degrees Fahrenheit.^ The constant heat
churns molten lava, its energy forcing tectonic plates to collide and push
upward. Like steam in a giant pressure cooker with no relief valve, the
energy continues to build upward. On April 0 , 8 , on Sumbawa, a far-
away island in Indonesia, the pent-up pressure exploded skyward. The
volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora contained the force “equivalent to
sixty thousand Hiroshima-sized atom bombs.”
Tambora’s eruption radically altered the Earth’s climate. Fine sulfur
particles traveled beyond the troposphere (where clouds and weather
happen) into a cloudless layer known as the stratosphere. News of the
volcano had reached New England, but colonists did not connect the
event to their predicament until late the following year. Only when
gravity forced enough particles back to the ground in Europe did the
pieces of the puzzle fall into place. The suspended volcanic particu-
lates had acted as a filter, keeping the Sun’s rays from reaching the
Earth’s surface, causing winter to return, and bringing farming to an
abrupt halt.
In America at the time, agriculture was the principal livelihood for
80 percent of the country’s workforce.^ Most people and their neighbors
had descended from generations of farmers, growing up with stories
of scarcity. They watched their parents go through times when all that
sustained them was an iron will and a lack of alternatives. They learned
from their parents’ experiences, yet still chose to follow in their footsteps.
Farming, after all, was what fed their families.
Yet as they watched the temperatures fall and winter return, events
that contradicted all understandings of seasons and weather, the thought
occurred that this might be the end. No matter how early they began
each day, nor how hard they ran, it was not enough. With an unpredict-
able and sometimes hostile environment always looming, there could
never be enough food.
When New Englanders learned the reason why the climate had
changed, all breathed a sigh of relief. The year was dubbed “Eighteen
Hundred and Froze to Death.”^ The phenomenon became part of their
collective memory of environmental forces that could bring farming
to a halt. When spring arrived and crops were planted the following