What Was the Worst Year to Be Alive?

In 1816, the snow fell in June. In New England, it buried new crops and killed birds where they sat. In July, a hard frost turned corn black. People who lived through it called the year "1800 and froze to death." The cause was a single volcanic eruption on the other side of the planet — Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which had detonated in April 1815 with a force a hundred times greater than Mount St. Helens. The ash it threw into the atmosphere formed a thin gray veil around the entire Earth, bouncing sunlight back into space. The planet cooled by just one degree Fahrenheit. That was enough to cancel summer across an entire hemisphere.

The episode, from the podcast What the Fact, walks through three candidate years for the worst in human history. Each one is a catastrophe. But each one also left behind something unexpected — a creative breakthrough, a social transformation, or a word we still use today.

The Year Without a Summer: 1816