The eruption was the most powerful in recorded memory, 10 times more powerful than the more famous Krakatoa, a hundred times stronger than Mount St. Helens. Thousands died immediately from breathing the ash, or drinking the water; thousands more from starvation, totaling nearly 90,000 deaths in Indonesia alone. But that was just the beginning.
In addition to millions of tons of ash, the force of the eruption threw 55 million tons of sulfur-dioxide gas more than twenty miles into the air, into the stratosphere. There, the sulfur dioxide rapidly combined with readily available hydroxide gas - which, in liquid form, is commonly known as hydrogen peroxide - to form more than 100 million tons of sulfuric acid.
The cloud spread around the world and caused global temperatures to drop 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn’t sound like much of a change, but in fact, it’s a massive change, and it caused the 'Year Without Summer' in 1816, and it stayed abnormally cool for almost a decade.
Crops failed, people starved and rioted, diseases ran rampant, rivers froze. April was cruel; A snowstorm started on April 12 that buried Quebec City in four feet of snow. That was just the start. In August, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of America.”
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Ha! My Subaru makes more climate change than that.
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