Year Without a Summer

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year, the Summer that Never Was, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death), because of severe summer climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. Evidence suggests the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.

Year Without a Summer in Supervolcano
Several months after the Yellowstone Supervolcano had erupted, Rob Ferguson and the other members of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were stuck in Guilford, Maine by an unusually early winter. With the heavy snow, Ferguson had checked out the Year Without a Summer online and hadn't liked what he had found. When he mentioned this to Dick Barber, the latter said that that eruption was a minor one compared to that of the supervolcano. To last out the current winter, the town residents would have to chop wood for heat and cooking since fuel oil wasn't coming in. What they would do if there wasn't a summer next year as happened in 1816 (snow in June in Maine) Barber didn't know but thought the place would resemble hell, Dante's hell from Inferno with Satan frozen in the middle of it. However, Barber was somewhat more optimistic than that and thought they would be able to muddle through at least one summer like that.