Stranded travelers aren’t the only ones cursing the volcanic ash cloud currently hovering over Europe. Kenyan farmers have been forced to dump many tons of Europe-bound vegetables and flowers, and food shortages have been reported in Europe and the U.S. Meanwhile, everyone from Whitney Houston to John Cleese is getting creative about transportation; non-celebrities are relying on social networking sites for alternatives. If this eruption is anything like the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, there may be at least a few positive artistic side-effects. The resulting dismal weather of 1816 (the Year Without a Summer) caused famine and rioting, but also reportedly resulted in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley‘s Frankenstein and John Polidori‘s The Vampyre.[%comments]
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TAGS: environment
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You know, there is a connection between volcanic activity and temperature. Maybe the earth can defend itself from global warming.
And Rasputina wrote an eerily compelling song about “1816, The Year Without A Summer.”
Since when did Mary Wollstonecraft write Frankenstein?
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.”
See http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/shelleybio.html
Oh great, more vampire movies.
I have ideas for volcano-vampire mashups:
An adaptation of Under the Volcano:
Under the Volcano with Vampires.
And Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover:
The Volcano Lover Meets the Vampires
Why would someone think that this tiny eruption was anything like the Tambora eruption, the largest known to have occurred in the last 1000 years?
Eyjafjallajökull’s Volcano Explosivity Index is no more than 3, Tambora was 7. That’s a factor of 10,000 between them, vaguely similar to the difference between the Feb 27 Chile earthquake and this morning’s earthquake in Mexico.
Don’ forget J M W Turner.
Out cycling this weekend, I saw some very impressionistic landscapes!