Windsor Castle has well over a hundred rooms. They have names such as the Green Drawing Room, the Crimson Drawing Room, and the Octagon Dining Room. Ceilings tend to be high. The outer walls are stone. Some of the windows are narrow slits, just wide enough to suit an archer, but others are much larger, well built to let in the cold of British winters. The doors could hardly have been better designed to lose heat. The round towers were never meant to hold the weather at bay.
William the Conqueror chose the site nine hundred years ago. Over the centuries, it has been enlarged and renovated. Parts of the castle originally built of wood are now stone.
It is a shame that my interview was refused, as I had but two questions for the queen. “How much is your heating bill?” I hoped to ask her. And, for follow-up, a delicate question about the quality and use of royal long underwear in winter within the stone walls of a drafty nine-hundred-year-old castle. Silk, I would guess, but verbal confirmation from the queen is needed.
What I really want to know is this: How did the castle’s occupants do during the Little Ice Age, starting perhaps as early as the fourteenth century and running until around 1850? And how did they do when Mount Tambora blew its volcanic top and ushered in the Year Without Summer? One can imagine the king’s voice echoing down a long stone hallway: “Break out the royal long johns, Squire. It looks to be a cold one again.”
On April 11, 1815, Mount Tambora, on an island called Sumbawa in Indonesia, exploded. This was no ordinary eruption. Four thousand feet of mountain summit disappeared during three months of tremors, rumblings, and lava and ash eviscerations. Twelve thousand people on Sumbawa died. More than forty thousand on the neighboring island of Lombok starved when their ash-covered crops failed. A British resident of Java, more than two hundred miles from the blast, wrote, “The atmosphere appeared to be loaded with a thick vapour: the Sun was rarely visible, and only at short intervals appearing very obscurely behind a semitransparent substance.” Sir Thomas Raffles, then the British lieutenant governor of Java, wrote of violent winds carrying away men, horses, and cattle. The volcano discharged a hundred times more ash than was discharged by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. It dumped more dust than Krakatau in 1883. And, to make things worse, it was the third major eruption since 1812. Soufrière, on St. Vincent Island in the Caribbean, had blown in 1812, and Mount Mayon, in the Philippines, had gone in 1814. Volcanic dust choked the stratosphere.
Dust in the stratosphere acts like a translucent shade on a window. It blocks the sun. This in itself is enough to cool the earth, but it gets worse. Decreased warmth from the sun changes wind and current movements in the Northern Hemisphere. Cold Arctic air moves south. Europeans and Americans called the year after the Mount Tambora eruption the Year Without Summer or the Poverty Year. The laconic farmers of New England referred to it simply as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” There were novelties such as flesh-colored snow in Hungary, red and yellow snow in Italy, and blue and red snow in the eastern United States, all the result of ash captured in snow clouds. An English vicar wrote, “During the entire season the sun rose each morning as though in a cloud of smoke, red and rayless, shedding little light or warmth and setting at night behind a thick cloud of vapor, leaving hardly a trace of its having passed over the face of the earth.” Summer temperatures were as much as eight degrees colder than normal. Violent thunderstorms with hail were unusually common. By the middle of summer, people were worried about crops. On the twentieth of July, the Times of London reported, “Should the present wet weather continue, the corn will inevitably be laid and the effects of such a calamity and at such a time cannot be otherwise than ruinous to the farmers, and even to the people at large.” During this period, a typical family could spend two-thirds of its income on food. In the United States, rivers as far south as Pennsylvania carried ice in July. It snowed in New England in June. And there were beautiful sunsets through the veil of stratospheric dust.
Mary Shelley was holed up in Lord Byron’s lakeside retreat near Geneva in the summer of 1816. The weather kept Byron’s guests indoors, and he challenged them to come up with ghost stories. Shelley came up with Frankenstein, which was published two years later. The popular impression of the novel today is based on movies that share only the name and a monster with the book, but the novel starts with letters from an Arctic explorer. The explorer spots a dogsled pulling a strange creature, the living thing mysteriously created by Dr. Frankenstein. Writing from an icebound boat, the explorer soon saves Frankenstein himself from the ice. Frankenstein tells the story of his creation, of how it murdered his wife, and of his obsession with tracking and killing the creature. Frankenstein dies on the boat. The creature boards the boat and looks over its dead creator. A conversation ensues between the explorer and the creature, running a few pages. The creature, saying farewell not only to the explorer but to all mankind, leaps through a cabin window, landing on an ice floe, and drifts off into the Arctic night.
While Shelley dreamt this up in the comfort of Byron’s home, the people outside suffered increasing hardships. Grain and potato prices tripled. More than thirty thousand Swiss were without jobs. They ate sorrel, a weedy vegetable then considered most fit for horses. They also dined on a form of lichen and, when they could get them, cats. The following year became known as the Year of the Beggars. In the United States, New England farms were wiped out. Thousands migrated westward toward richer soil. Among the migrants was Joseph Smith, who would later found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Britain and France, the cold weather led to food riots. Whereas wealthier individuals may have been able to feed themselves, the scarcity of oats made it increasingly expensive to feed horses. This made alternative forms of transportation attractive, leading Baron Karl Drais to invent the Draisine, also called the velocipede or Laufmaschine (running machine), but best described as a steerable wooden scooter. The Draisine would eventually evolve into the bicycle.
The Year Without Summer was a harsh year during a harsh set of centuries. Centuries earlier, ending sometime around the fourteenth century, Europe had enjoyed temperate weather. England and France came of age during what has since been called the Medieval Warm Period, stretching from about 800 to around 1300. Vineyards thrived in a warmer England. Although most people depended on subsistence farming methods comparable to those used in the worst of today’s developing world, populations grew. With good weather, subsistence farming provided basic necessities as well as a surplus, and the surplus supported cathedral building, monks, and the development of trade. This was the period when Norse colonists settled Iceland and Greenland. During colonization, the shores of Iceland were often ice-free, and parts of Greenland’s coastal zone were as green as its name implies.
But something changed. By 1300, reaching the Norse colonies meant sailing far offshore to avoid ice. The Norse settlements in Greenland became less green and were abandoned. In 1492, Pope Alexander VI wrote a letter about commerce to Iceland, saying “shipping to the country is very infrequent because of the extensive freezing of the waters — no ship having put into shore, it is believed, for eighty years.” Mountain glaciers expanded in Scandinavia, Alaska, China, the Andes, and New Zealand, with permanent mountain snow and ice occurring more than three hundred feet lower than it had just a few centuries earlier. Some European glaciers reportedly advanced hundreds of feet each month, even in summer. Loss of grazing land and crop failures from shortened growing seasons translated quickly into hardship, but at the same time, certain fish species moved south. “The herrings,” wrote British geographer William Camden in 1588, “which in the times of our grandfathers swarmed only about Norway, now in our times… swim in great shoals round our coasts every year.” In 1610, John Taylor of central Scotland wrote, “The oldest man alive never saw but snow on the tops of divers of these hills, both in summer as well as in winter.” The Thames froze repeatedly, providing an icy thoroughfare through central London. Diarist John Evelyn, in an entry dated Ja
nuary 24, 1684, wrote, “Frost… more & more severe, the Thames before London was planted with bothes [booths] in formal streets, as in a Citty… the trees not onely splitting as if lightning-strock, but Men & Cattel perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with yce, that no vessells could stirr out, or come in.” In 1692, a French official wrote, “The poor people are obliged to use their oats to make bread. This winter they will have to live on oats, barley, peas, and other vegetables.” Between 1695 and 1728, Eskimo kayakers, apparently hunting along the southern edge of the polar ice and then perhaps blown off course or intentionally exploring south of their normal hunting grounds, were spotted off Scotland’s Orkney Islands. In at least one case, kayaks were seen as far south as the River Don near Aberdeen.
This was all part of what has come to be called the Little Ice Age. François Matthes, a glacial geologist, first used the phrase “little ice age” in 1939: “We are living in an epoch of renewed but moderate glaciation — a ‘little ice age’ that already has lasted about 4,000 years.” Later, the Medieval Warm Period was recognized, separating a cold snap that had started around 2000 b.c. from the cold snap that started sometime around the fourteenth century. But it is not right to think of these periods as cold snaps. They were, on average, colder than earlier times, but only by a couple of degrees. Summers could be quite hot, but winters were colder and longer than at other times, bringing the average down.
Dust from volcanoes played a role, but only well after cooling had started. A disruption in warm ocean currents may have played a role, too, but then one would have to ask what disrupted the currents themselves. It is known that changes in the sun of only a few tenths of a percent can change the earth’s climate. In 1711, the English astronomer William Derham commented on “great intervals” with no sunspots between 1660 and 1684, at a time when stargazing was increasingly popular: “Spots could hardly escape the sight of so many Observers of the Sun, as were then perpetually peeping upon him with their Telescopes… all the world over.” Although much has been made of this, no one has explained why sunspot activity decreased or exactly how this might explain climate change.
Snow played a role in the making of the Little Ice Age. Snow is an almost perfect reflector, sending heat and light back into space with remarkable efficiency. When snow covers the ground, the earth does not warm as quickly as it does when the snow is gone. A snow-covered planet is a cold planet. But this leaves the question of cause unanswered, since the cold would have had to come before the snow, at least initially.
Whatever the cause of the Little Ice Age, and as significant as it may have been to the people it iced, it was nothing compared to what is normally thought of as the Pleistocene Ice Age, the series of cold snaps that led to massive glaciation. Despite its name, the Pleistocene Ice Age started during the late Pliocene, some two and a half million years ago, with the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. For two and a half million years, it waxed and waned in intensity. The ice sheets advanced and retreated, marking the world’s timeline with glacial and interglacial periods. The ice sheets expanded during glacials and retreated during interglacials. The Pleistocene Ice Age is only now appearing to peter out. The last glacial ended ten thousand years ago. Today’s interglacial leaves us with nothing more than Antarctica, scattered mountain glaciers, and the remnant ice sheet of Greenland. The Pleistocene Ice Age gave the world woolly mammoths, the ice-carved valleys of Alaska, and the beauty of Scotland. But for all this, the Pleistocene Ice Age was only one of at least four major ice ages in the world’s timeline. And it was no more than a chilly breeze compared to the ice age of seven hundred million years ago, when the entire planet may have been more or less frozen, a godforsaken snowball hurtling through space.
It is September tenth and sixty-eight degrees on the lower slopes of Ben Nevis, Scotland’s highest peak. Scotland’s reputation for mountains comes from their abundance, not their height. Ben Nevis is a mere 4,409 feet tall, a bump trying to become a hill and calling itself a mountain. Nevertheless, the tourist information office issues dire warnings. Hikers should have warm clothes. They should be prepared to overnight in cold, wet conditions. The mountain creates its own weather. Snow can come at any time. Fog can cloak the route without warning. Hikers should have adequate food. They should have an Ordnance Survey topographical map and a compass, and they should know how to use both. In short, they should take the hike seriously.
My companion and I walk the lower slopes in T-shirts and shorts. Between us, we have two scones left over from breakfast. We have the map from our walking guide to Scotland, a small, unreadable sketch that shows a zigzagged switchback trail leading toward a summit. My compass is in Alaska. Her compass is in Holland. In short, we have no choice but to climb the mountain.
It is an upward slog, steady and constant. We round a bend, and wind slaps us head-on. We are both sweating, and the cold wind is a comfort. We pick up the pace.
Scotland is a landscape formed by ice. To drive up from London is to drive into glaciated terrain. South and west of the extent of glaciation, it is flat and neatly cultivated. Then it becomes the rolling hills of glacial moraine. Here the glaciers coming from the north slowed, retreated, advanced again, finally stopped and pulled back. With each hesitation, millions of pounds of crushed rock and dirt were dumped, leaving moraines behind to form the rolling hills. Farther north, small steep mounds called drumlins pock scattered valleys. Drumlins formed when hard rock under the glacier slowed down its forward movement. Tripped by the obstruction, the glacier dumped part of its load of rock and dirt. Most of it piled up just upstream of the obstruction — up-glacier, toward the source of the creeping snow and ice — forming a blunt slope, while the downstream tail tapered to ground level. Drumlins in Scotland often occur in bunches that are sometimes called “baskets of eggs.” And that is what they look like: baskets of earthen eggs on valley floors. And with the drumlins, scores of erratics — boulders carried by glaciers — pepper the valley floors and the shallower slopes of the mountains. The erratics — odd shapes, some small enough to be lifted by one man and others the size of a van — stand or lie on their sides. Sheep wander around them, grazing, chewing stupidly in the midst of grandeur.
Farther north, in the Scottish Highlands, the mountains and valleys have been shaped by glaciers. It could almost be Alaska. The ridges are often knife-edged, sharpened by glacial erosion into what some call arêtes. Arêtes form when glaciers freeze around rocks. Glacial water finds its way into cracks and crevices, refreezes, expands, shatters the rocks, and then sweeps the broken mess downhill. A hollow called a corrie or a cirque is left in the side of the mountain, under the knife-edged peaks, with the soft curve of a giant easy chair. The mountains become steep sided, the valleys U shaped, the ground scraped and abraded and scarred by grinding rocks and ice. The brutality of ice leaves mountains brutally beautiful.
We stop at the top of Ben Nevis to eat our scones. Here, though only a few thousand feet above our starting point, the temperature is in the fifties. With windchill, it is in the low forties. Our clothes are damp. We cool quickly, sitting behind what is left of a stone building. The roof is gone, and the upper walls have collapsed. Trash litters the interior. Tourism is part of the mountain’s history and has been for some time. At one point, two women offered a bed-and-breakfast on top of the mountain — ten shillings for lodging with breakfast, three shillings for lunch. Before that, the mountain hosted a weather station. In the late 1800s, with a climate still hungover from the Little Ice Age, workers reported having to tunnel thirty feet through snow to get in and out of the station. On some days, the wind could knock over a grown man, and the workers moved about roped together. The average temperature was just above freezing. On cold days, Ben Nevis touched the zero mark. Average annual precipitation was more than thirteen feet. The weather station closed, perhaps wisely, in 1904. Today its remains stand beneath a metal-doored survival shelter. I peek inside to find an otherwise bare cell littered with
trash, like the stone-walled ruins outside.
My companion, who suffers from Raynaud’s disease, shows me her hands. As soon as she stopped walking, she cooled, and the blood vessels in her fingers constricted. The fingertips have taken on the color of a yellowing corpse. The lower halves of her fingers and the palms of her hands are a faintly mottled mauve, a most unnatural color for human flesh. At this point, she cannot work a zipper. I touch her fingers. They are cold. She tells me they feel numb. I tell her they feel dead. When they warm, they will sting. The disease affects something like one in twenty people. It comes in varying shades of severity. Women are more susceptible than men. Raynaud’s is best prevented, physicians say, by staying out of the cold. It is best treated by rewarming. The disease is more of an annoyance than a serious threat. When I say this, I mean an annoyance for her. For me it is a curiosity. As we move down the mountain, I entertain myself by stopping intermittently to observe her recovery. At one point, her fingers are striped with mauve and pale yellow bands. Sadly, I am not carrying a camera. It occurs to me that Raynaud’s would be deadly if it prevented someone from striking a match to start a fire or tying a bootlace or cinching down the harness on a dogsled. Raynaud’s would have had no place on Greely’s crew, or Scott’s, or Shackleton’s.
The glacial ice is long gone from Scotland, absent now for thousands of years. But ice still sculpts the landscape. In winter, pipkrakes churn the soil. Pipkrakes give the collapsing crunch to frozen ground in early winter. They are known by other names: needle ice and mush frost, Kammeis to Germans, shimobashira to Japanese. They grow within the soil, from the bottom up, when the temperature drops below freezing. Water in the soil freezes, and the freezing water sucks more water up from beneath. Vertical crystals grow. They grow as much as half an inch in a single night. As they grow, they push the soil upward. The churning of the ground pushes the fine-grained soil to the surface, where it is blown away in areas with high winds, leaving behind shallow hollows and causing what some farmers call soil deflation. If you are in the business of growing crops, soil deflation deflates your assets. Certain farmers, unable to bear the thought of blowing assets, compact the ground where pipkrakes form.
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