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| The Laki volcano |
Great changes in history have often arrived accompanied by great natural tragedies.
The COVID is going to change a lot of things in our routines, especially in some European citizens who are going to live incredible events in their lives in a closer future.
A lot of interesting things are going to happen and we must be ready to confront them and see them as a great opportunity to improve our lives, our economy and put our culture in the place it deserves.
On a day like today in 1783, a poisonous cloud caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland reached Le Havre in France.
The most part of historians say that this was the event whose consequences originate the French Revolution. This is, perhaps, one of the best examples of the affectation of nature over our history.
The Grandma, who is very interested in these future changes, wants to talk about these past events that changed our history finishing a long dark season of feudal system and starting a new one.
Laki or Lakagígar, Craters of Laki, is a volcanic fissure in the western part of Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland, not far from the volcanic fissure of Eldgjá and the small village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur.
More information: British Geological Survey
The fissure is properly referred to as Lakagígar, while Laki is a mountain that the fissure bisects. Lakagígar is part of a volcanic system centered on the volcano Grímsvötn and including the volcano Thordarhyrna. It lies between the glaciers of Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull, in an area of fissures that run in a southwest to northeast direction.
The system erupted violently over an eight-month period between June 1783 and February 1784 from the Laki fissure and the adjoining volcano Grímsvötn, pouring out an estimated 42 billion tons or 14 km3 of basalt lava and clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide compounds that contaminated the soil, leading to the death of over 50% of Iceland's livestock population, and the destruction of the vast majority of all crops. This led to a famine which then killed approximately 25% of the island's human population. The lava flows also destroyed 20 villages.
The Laki eruption
and its aftermath caused a drop in global temperatures, as 120 million
tons of sulfur dioxide was spewed into the Northern Hemisphere. This caused crop failures in Europe and may have caused droughts in North Africa and India.
On 8 June 1783, a
25 km long fissure with 130 craters opened with phreatomagmatic
explosions because of the groundwater interacting with the rising basalt
magma.
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| The Laki volcano |
Over a few days the eruptions became less explosive, Strombolian, and later Hawaiian in character, with high rates of lava effusion.
This event is rated as 4 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, but the eight-month emission of sulfuric aerosols resulted in one of the most important climatic and socially repercussive events of the last millennium. The eruption, also known as the Skaftáreldar, Skaftá fires or Síðueldur produced an estimated 14 km3 of basalt lava, and the total volume of tephra emitted was 0.91 km3. Lava fountains were estimated to have reached heights of 800 to 1,400 m. The gases were carried by the convective eruption column to altitudes of about 15 km.
The eruption continued until 7 February 1784, but most of the lava was ejected in the first five months. One study states that the event occurred as ten pulses of activity, each starting with a short-lived explosive phase followed by a long-lived period of fire-fountaining".
Grímsvötn volcano, from which the Laki fissure extends, was also erupting at the time, from 1783 until 1785. The outpouring of gases, including an estimated 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and an estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide, gave rise to what has since become known as the Laki haze across Europe.
More information: Oregon State University
The consequences for Iceland, known as the Móðuharðindin or Mist Hardships, were disastrous. An estimated 20–25% of the population died in the famine and fluoride poisoning after the fissure eruptions ensued. Some sources specify a death toll of 9,000 people. Approximately 80% of sheep, 50% of cattle and 50% of horses died because of dental fluorosis and skeletal fluorosis from the 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride that were released. The livestock deaths were primarily caused by eating the contaminated grass; the subsequent famine claimed many of the human lives that were lost.
The parish priest and dean of Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla, Jón Steingrímsson (1728–1791), grew famous because of the eldmessa, fire sermon, that he delivered on 20 July 1783. The people of the small settlement of Kirkjubæjarklaustur
were worshipping while the village was endangered by a lava stream,
which ceased to flow not far from town, with the townsfolk still in
church.
More information: The Guardian
The resulting famine that afflicted Egypt in 1784 cost it roughly one-sixth of its population. The eruption was also found to have affected the southern Arabian Peninsula and India.
An
estimated 120,000,000 long tons of sulfur dioxide was emitted, about
three times the total annual European industrial output in 2006 but
delivered to higher altitudes, hence more persistent, and equivalent to
six times the total 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption.
This outpouring of
sulfur dioxide during unusual weather conditions caused a thick haze to spread across western Europe, resulting in many thousands of deaths throughout the remainder of 1783 and the winter of 1784.
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| The volcanic Canyon and Laki craters |
The summer of 1783 was the hottest on record and a rare high-pressure zone over Iceland caused the winds to blow to the south-east.
The poisonous cloud drifted to Bergen in Denmark–Norway, then spread to Prague in the Kingdom of Bohemia -now the Czech Republic by 17 June- Berlin by 18 June, Paris by 20 June, Le Havre by 22 June, and Great Britain by 23 June.
The fog was so thick that boats stayed in port, unable to navigate, and the sun was described as blood coloured.
Inhaling sulfur dioxide gas causes victims to choke as their internal soft tissue swells -the gas reacts with the moisture in lungs and produces sulfurous acid. The local death rate in Chartres was up by 5% during August and September, with more than 40 dead.
In Great Britain, the east of England was most affected. The records show that the additional deaths were among outdoor workers; the death rate in Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire and the east coast was perhaps two or three times the normal rate. It has been estimated that 23,000 British people died from the poisoning.
The weather became very hot, causing severe thunderstorms with large hailstones that were reported to have killed cattle, until the haze dissipated in the autumn. The winter of 1783–1784 was very severe; the naturalist Gilbert White in Selborne, Hampshire, reported 28 days of continuous frost. The extreme winter is estimated to have caused 8,000 additional deaths in the UK. During the spring thaw, Germany and Central Europe reported severe flood damage.
More information: The Ultimate History Project
The meteorological impact of Laki continued, contributing significantly to several years of extreme weather in Europe.
In France, the sequence of extreme weather events included a surplus harvest in 1785 that caused poverty for rural workers, as well as droughts, bad winters and summers. These events contributed significantly to an increase in poverty and famine that may have contributed to the French Revolution in 1789.
Laki was only one factor in a decade of climatic disruption, as Grímsvötn was erupting from 1783 to 1785, and there may have been an unusually strong El Niño effect from 1789 to 1793.
In North America, the winter of 1784 was the longest and one of the coldest on record. It was the longest period of below-zero temperatures in New England, with the largest accumulation of snow in New Jersey, and the longest freezing over of Chesapeake Bay, where Annapolis, Maryland is, then the capital of the United States; the weather delayed Congressmen in coming to Annapolis to vote for the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolutionary War. A huge snowstorm hit the South; the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans and there were reports of ice floes in the Gulf of Mexico.
More information: Wired
Remind me that the most fertile lands
were built by the fires of volcanoes.
Andrea Gibson
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