The Year Without a Summer
How a volcanic apocalypse in 1816 forced Mary Shelley to create Frankenstein.
About this video
How a volcanic apocalypse in 1816 forced Mary Shelley to create Frankenstein.
Full transcript of The Year Without a Summer
In June of eighteen-sixteen, the snow simply refused to stop falling. Summer vanished, replaced overnight by a biting, unnatural freeze. Crops froze in the soil, turning black and rotting in the fields. Blue skies disappeared, choked out by a permanent, eerie red twilight. As starvation spread, panicked crowds filled the streets. They believed the apocalypse had arrived, unaware of the real monster. Thousands of miles away, Mount Tambora had violently erupted. It blasted millions of tons of volcanic ash directly into the stratosphere. An invisible dust cloud blocked the sun, wrapping Earth in a freezing shroud. Trapped indoors by the endless storms, a group of writers gathered. To kill the gloom, they challenged each other to write ghost stories. That frozen summer forced eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley to dream up Frankenstein. A legendary monster, born from a real-world atmospheric nightmare. We are always just one volcanic eruption away from an endless winter. What will we create when the sun goes dark again?