Maine’s Volcanic Summer of 1816

Fourth of July celebration 1816. It was plain to see that there would be no apple or pear crop that year, since the beginning fruits were frozen solid. Belfast Historical Society and Museum

The volcano currently active in Hawaii is a reminder of their ever presence. The volcano on Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompei, Italy in 79AD and the Mount St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington in 1980 were explosive volcanos that blew the tops off mountains pouring ash into the atmosphere.

Much larger than either of these was the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815. That volcano’s ash in the stratosphere of the northern hemisphere blocked out the sun. The result for north America and in particular the state of Maine was “the year without a summer” when crops failed, fisheries were altered and people starved in what was a more agrarian economy and society.

Recently scientists have determined that freezing summertime temperatures from this 1815 climate event had a dramatic and lasting effect on some New England fish, fishing and communities. One effect was the sudden decline in alewife stocks and the equally rapid increase in mackerel harvests. The importance of this research goes beyond what it reveals about the complex effects of a single extreme climate event. The earth is experiencing and will continue to experience warming temperatures and extreme climate events.

Part of a scientific paper that was written about the effects of the Tambora volcano and the resulting mackerel year in the Gulf of Maine has been exerted below. The entire 18 page paper, Tambora and the mackerel year: Phenology and fisheries during an extreme climate event, with graphs, bibliographic and source references, can be read at fishermensvoice.com

Tambora and the mackerel year

By Karen E. Alexander, William B. Leavenworth, Theodore V. Willis, Carolyn Hall, Steven Mattocks, Steven M. Bittner, Emily Klein, Michelle Staudinger, Alexander Bryan, Julianne Rosset, Benjamin H. Carr, Adrian Jordaan.

Read the 18-page paper here .

On 5 April 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora exploded in one of the most significant volcanic events in recorded history. With among the highest explosive indexes in 500 years, it ejected about 100 cobic kilometers of ash into the stratosphere.

Upper-level winds streaming northward from the equator swept its sulfate aerosols around the world, dropping global temperatures by 1° to 1.5°C and generating extreme weather in the northern hemisphere. Unseasonable cold accompanied by droughts and floods characterized the period from the winter of 1815 to the spring of 1817. Catastrophic weather conditions afflicted China.

Floods and famine ravaged northwestern Europe, and starvation threatened the eastern United States and Canada.

In southern New England, the months from May to September 1816 were several degrees colder than average, but spikes in temperature punctured the cold. Crop yields fell as much as 90%.

Unlike Tambora’s documented effects on land, its influence on coastal ecology and fisheries has received little attention. However, in New England, 1816 was called not only the “year without a summer” and the “year of 1800-and-Froze-to-Death” but also the “mackerel year,” suggesting discernable effects on fisheries.

We propose that the coldest summer in more than 200 years set within 19 months of wildly variable temperatures interrupted fish attempting to feed or spawn in New England’s freshwater and coastal ecosystems. In a year distinguished for widespread crop failure, fisheries failure could have further jeopardized human food supplies far more dependent on marine protein than today.

Global warming has fueled concerted research on recent, ongoing, and potential transformations of human and natural systems . However, gradual warming is not the proximate threat from climate change. Rising global temperatures have already increased the number and intensity of extreme climate events. Consequent human suffering and economic loss are well documented in public media, even as devastated coastlines and marine ecosystems, some in conservation areas and experimental field sites, increasingly appear in research.

Coastal fisheries, ecosystems, and economies are particularly vulnerable to sudden climate events, yet long-term effects may be apparent only in retrospect.

Historically, fisheries played an important role in national economies and foreign policies. Marine resource harvest generated wealth in trade, promoted transportation networks and infrastructure, and transmitted social and cultural traditions while providing a living to generations of fishers.

Over time, as primary stocks declined in abundance and quality, a regular pattern of exploitation evolved. Marine resources were first harvested close to home and then at increasingly greater distances with greater effort, even as original, depleted targets were replaced by others that were still abundant and accessible. From prehistoric shell middens to sport fishing trophies, global evidence of marine resource harvest shows similar progressions. These patterns may disclose long-term processes underlying social-ecological change that, at present, can be difficult to identify.

Tambora roughly coincided with the earliest, nearly complete time series of local fisheries data collected in the Gulf of Maine: Fish inspectors’ reports (FIRs) from Massachusetts and Maine began in 1804. Excepting an interruption in ME from 1820 to 1832 (following statehood), FIRs presented yearly quantities of brine-pickled fish inspected for export out of state from each town supporting commercial fisheries for most of the 19th century.

Tambora (1816–1820): Volcanic winter altered the balance between export markets and local consumption. Crop failure was so extensive that farmers slaughtered livestock for want of fodder to keep them through the winter. “In northern Vermont and New Hampshire, farmers fed their pigs with fish caught in local streams. Others had mackerel shipped in from New England seaports.” Fish were likely caught and consumed locally in greater quantities, but this catch was not recorded.

In 1816, all living things in the GoM and elsewhere in the northern latitudes endured great fluctuations in temperature and weather, and long periods of bitter cold due to volcanic winter. Historical evidence suggests that weather-related fisheries failures may have occurred on the Penobscot River, which produced the most alewives in 1815 (372,222 kg) and 1816 (334,029 kg). Winter was so pronounced and prolonged there that, in 1815, 1816, and 1817, people could walk across the ice from Belfast to Castine. Famine in 1816 forced the Penobscot Indians to sell most of their river bottomland for food, which suggests that few fish could be caught in the river. The nearby town of Orrington failed to lease its weir rights in 1818, implying that people had become skeptical of the weirs’ profitability. Only during Tambora did Yearly °C seem consequential for fisheries. We turned to daily temperatures in search of probable cause.

Alewives and mackerel arrive earlier when average temperatures are colder, whereas shad and herring arrive later when average temperatures are warmer. Earliest to arrive, alewives fared the worst.

Both the coldest day and the warmest day fell within their seasonal window, and intervals suitable for normal activities were badly fragmented by unfavorable temperatures.

Seasonal movements and spawning behavior of adults may have been altered or delayed, and mortality at all life stages exacerbated. Alewives suffered significant adverse conditions in all categories with the overall lowest scores. Vulnerable in general due to higher temperature requirements, shad seemed to fare relatively better in 1816. It was a good year for mackerel and exceptional for herring.

Mt . Tambora caldera 200 years after the Indonesian volcano erupted in 1815 impacting most of the northern hemisphere.

Thus, Tambora’s daily temperatures likely penalized alewives but benefited shad, mackerel, and herring.

Human adaptation to Tambora

We used long-standing historical methods to analyze narrative evidence and reconstruct human responses to volcanic winter.

According to a contemporary Maine newspaper, the American Advocate and Kennebec Advertiser, which coveredNorth American manifestations of the catastrophe and responses to it, widespread famine afflicted Lower Canada and Newfoundland during the “mackerel year” of 1816.

Crop failures and the threat of famine in New England initiated imports of Midwestern foodstuffs sent down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and then by sea to Northeastern seaports. Potomac River ice was 63.5-cm-thick off Alexandria, 1 March 1817, and on the New Jersey coast “immense numbers of cod-fish [were] thrown up on the beach, dead,” 8 March 1817.

Urban famine necessitated soup kitchens in Portland, ME, and in New York City, 1 March 1817, 8 March 1817, where annual mortality rose to nearly 3% 15 February 1817; by comparison, the Center for Disease Control calculated the 2013 U.S. death rate as 0.7%. Catchable fish would have been a bulwark against starvation as soon as gear could go in the water; domestic consumption would have risen.

Tambora’s effects lasted through the spring of 1817. Even as temperatures moderated, New England was still plagued with spring flooding, causing property destruction and agricultural losses, and a significant drought throughout northern New England lasted until late September. By that spring, little protein was left in New England except for spawning cohorts of fish arriving in local estuaries and streams, and marine predators following them inshore. Crops recovered somewhat in the summer of 1817 and famine abated, 1817, but it likely took farmers several years to rebuild their livestock.

Some did not bother to rebuild but left for the Northwest Territories, causing a CT minister to observe: “We had a great deal of moving this spring … our number rather diminishes …” Thus, an unprecedented environmental and social crisis unfolded during the “mackerel year” and lingered into 1817. It caused the widespread redistribution of foodstuffs and stimulated emigration while enhancing the importance of marine fisheries as reliable sources of food.

We can only speculate on the likely response of the fish in Tambora’s aftermath, but historical records suggest that desperate people turned to mackerel in extremis because mackerel were available early and in great numbers when other species were not. Mackerel became both a lucrative commercial product and a utilitarian fish that fed livestock, farm families, and upstream villagers as alewives once had. Fishery expansion likely encouraged the spread of the mackerel jig and nudged fishing offshore, but it would not have depressed the alewife fishery. Although not the sole cause, Tambora’s extreme event triggered the precise sequence of changes evident in the historical record.

The climate emergency caused by Tambora triggered a rapid, regional “resource switching,” or “moving on” response from GoM fishermen, who redirected their efforts farther offshore toward schooling pelagic fish. Although weather conditions moderated in 1818, many inland communities had already abandoned commercial export fisheries. ME soon followed MA into pelagic fisheries, although north of the Kennebec, herring were targeted instead of mackerel. Adaptations became permanent not because of permanent environmental damage and lack of natural resilience, nor of long-term planning and economic imperative, but because contingent human responses to the immediate threat created a new range of adaptive opportunities that were transformative.