In June 1816, people stepped outside to frozen ground, snow falling in New York and Maine, and a dry fog so thick they could stare at sunspots with the naked eye. It felt like the end of the world. It was, in fact, the atmospheric fallout of a mountain that exploded on the other side of the planet a year earlier.

This episode is a story of systemic fragility, tracing how a single environmental trigger rippled outward to break the global climate for an entire year. From the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora to famine, disease, mass migration, and the birth of iconic literature, we follow one of the most consequential disasters in modern history.

• How Tambora’s VEI-7 eruption, 100 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens, formed a stratospheric sulfate veil
• Why the global average dropped only half a degree yet froze corn “in the milk” and caused 800 percent price spikes
• The cascade of famine, typhus, cholera spreading to Moscow, and Europe’s most violent unrest since the Revolution
• How New England climate refugees reshaped the map, centering abolitionism and prompting the move that led to Mormonism
• Frankenstein, the vampire, Byron’s poem “Darkness,” red-tinged sunsets in paintings, and the invention of the bicycle