Mount Tambora changed the world. In 1815, Indonesia’s volcano erupted in the most powerful eruption in recorded history, sending a huge plume of tiny particles high into the atmosphere, cooling the planet while wreaking havoc.

What followed was called “year without summerj»: global temperatures dropped, crops were destroyed, people starved, a cholera pandemic spread and tens of thousands died.

Some believe that the volcano inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein when she was in Switzerland in 1816.

Many volcanoes have erupted since then, but the Tambora remains the planet’s most recent massive explosion.

The question is not if, but when, it will “wake up,” Markus Stoffel, a climate professor at the University of Geneva, told CNN.

The geological evidence suggests a 1 in 6 chance of a massive eruption this century, he estimated.

This time, however, if it happens it will be in a different world that is not only more densely populated but has also been heated by the climate crisis.

The next huge explosion will “cause climate chaos,” Stoffel said, and humanity “he has no plan».

A huge volcanic eruption can push sulfur dioxide through the troposphere — the part of the atmosphere where weather is observed — and into the stratosphere, the layer about 7 miles above the Earth’s surface where airplanes fly.

For modern volcanoes, satellite data shows how much sulfur dioxide is being released. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it spewed about 15 million tons of sulfur into the stratosphere. Although this was not a huge eruption like Tambora, it still cooled the world by about 0.5 degrees Celsius for several years.

For older volcanoes, however, “we have very poor dataStoffel said. Scientists are trying to reconstruct these past eruptions using information from ice cores and tree rings, which are like time capsules, storing secrets of the past atmosphere.

From this they know that the massive eruptions of the past few thousand years have temporarily cooled the planet by about 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Tambora, for example, lowered average global temperatures by at least 1 degree Celsius. There are indications that the massive Samalas eruption in Indonesia in 1257 may have helped trigger the “Little Ice Age,” a cold period that lasted hundreds of years.

There is also evidence that massive eruptions can affect rainfall and dry up monsoon systems, including those in Africa and Asia. “The summer monsoon happens because the land warms faster than the ocean,” Robock said. A massive volcanic eruption can disrupt the temperature difference between the two.