June 8

Perhaps the worst period of Iceland’s history commenced on this date in 1783, when the Laki volcano erupted, that oozing laza and spewing pyroclasts and poisonous gases into the atmosphere for eight consecutive months. Located in the Southeast of Iceland at the corner of the Vatnajokull Glacier, Laki ultimately coughed out 14 cubic kilometers of lava over an area of 600 square miles, making it the largest lava eruption in recorded history. The Skaftáreldar, as it came to be known, killed one out of every five Icelanders over the next two years, most of whom succumbed to a brutal famine when most of the nation’s livestock perished.

Ebenezer Henderson, a Scotsman who published a travelogue about Iceland thirty years after the eruption, provides us with one of the best descriptions of the event:

[It]not only appears to have been more tremendous in its phenomena than any recorded in the modern annals of Iceland, but it was followed by a train of consequences the most direful and melancholy, some of which continue to be felt to this day. Immense floods of red-hot lava were poured down from the hills with amazing velocity, and, spreading over the low country, burnt up men, cattle, churches, houses, and every thing they attacked in their progress. Not only was all vegetation, in the immediate neighbourhood of the volcano, destroyed by the ashes, brimstone, and pumice, which it emitted; but, being borne up to an inconceivable height in the atmosphere, they were scattered over the whole island, impregnating the air with noxious vapours, intercepting the genial rays of the sun, and empoisoning whatever could satisfy the hunger or quench the thirst of man and beast. Even in some of the more distant districts, the quantity of ashes that fell was so great, that they were gathered up by handfuls. Upwards of four hundred people were instantly deprived of a home; the fish were driven from the coasts, and the elements seemed to vie with each other which should commit the greatest depredations; famine and pestilence stalked abroad, and cut down their victims with ruthless cruelty; while death himself was glutted with the prey. In some houses there was scarcely a sound individual left to tend the afflicted, or any who possessed sufficient strength to inter the dead. The most miserably emaciated tottering skeletons were seen in every quarter. When the animals that had died of hunger and disease were consumed, the wretched creatures had nothing to eat but raw hides, and old pieces of leather and ropes, which they boiled and devoured with avidity. The horses ate the flesh off one another, and for want of other sustenance had recourse to turf, wood, and even excrementitious substances; while the sheep devoured each other's wool. In a word, the accumulation of miseries, originating in the volcanic eruption, was so dreadful, that, in the short space of two years, not fewer than 9,336 human beings, 28,000 horses, 11,461 head of cattle, and 190,488 sheep perished on the island!

The Laki eruption also temporarily reshaped the planet’s climate, cooling North America to such an extent that the Mississippi River froze as far south as New Orleans the next winter. Mortality rates in rural England also rose over the next few years, as clouds of ash precipitated respiratory illness and killed off crops and livestock. Combined with the effects of El Nino patterns and related Icelandic eruptions from Grimsvotn (which lasted until 1785), the Laki event helped devastate France’s harvest throughout the rest of the decade, leading to massive poverty, famine, and discontent. By 1789, the French had seen enough and took matters into their own hands.