Two hundred and forty-one years ago, as general George Washington marched back into New York City as British troops were ejected when a volcano erupted, it was in Iceland.
For eight months during 1783 Laki eruptions erupted lava, and released toxic gasses into the air. A quarter of Iceland’s inhabitants died as sulfur-rich gases that spewed out across the globe reflected sun’s rays, causing several locations on Earth more chilly.
Based on evidence found in white spruce trees, scientists believe that the Laki eruption caused a lot of trouble for the northwest Alaska residents who didn’t know the reason why their July changed into November the following year.
Rosanne D’Arrigo from the tree-ring lab at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory located in New York once told the tale of the year in Alaska that was without an summer.
On a wall in a large meeting hall within Washington, D.C., in the past she showed a picture of tree rings taken from the white spruce tree of Alaska. Within a series of dark lines, there is one faint line that is aligned with the year 1783.
Tree rings are densely walled cells which form in conifers into the season of growth. The tree ring that is difficult to see in D’Arrigo’s illustration shows an extraordinary year, 1783 — in the middle of years of normal growth in spruce.
A. D’Arrigo Alaska archaeologist Karen Workman and former Gordon Jacoby once wrote of the “disaster for the northwest Alaska Inuit” caused by the Laki eruption, and the cold temperatures that came after. The scientists came to their conclusion mostly on the wood cores taken from spruce white spruce near the northern edge of the treeline.
James Louis Giddings has collected many of these plugs.
In the summer in 1940, the Giddings an archaeologist and mining engineer who was educated at UAF and UAF, flew across the Arctic from Fairbanks towards Allakaket. In the small town where he was, he pointed his compass at a mountain pass crossing the Koyukuk River that would lead him to the headwaters of Kobuk River.
Giddings then began walking. He was carrying a 40-pound backpack as well as an .22 rifle, and “a set of heavy-duty underwear one should wear for mosquito repellent.”
He joined an ice raft made of logs once it reached the Kobuk River. He floated along its length and collected tree cores on the way, making stops at potential and well-known archeological sites.
At the at the mouth of the Kobuk the river, he turned left and walked up into the Noatak River. After Giddings had finished his work there, he headed towards his next destination, the Seward Peninsula, not finishing his scientific research until he entered Haycock, the city of Haycock close to the present-day village of Koyuk.
In the fall of 1940, Giddings completed his master’s thesis, which detailed his amazing fieldwork as well as the dozens of tree cores he gathered.
Half a century later scientists from Lamont-Doherty employed a portion of Giddings samples. Based on tree-ring data from Giddings and other locations in Alaska as well as the actual weather station data from the University of Alaska and other places, the scientists reconstructed Alaska temperatures in summer between the late 1600s and the present.
They estimated that average Alaska temperatures between May and August were around 53 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the time. In 1783 the May up to the end of August, average temperatures were 44 degrees.
“You have this weirdness that’s completely off the chart,” D’Arrigo said.
To demonstrate the utterly bizarre nature of 1783, the scientists from Lamont-Doherty also used an oral tradition book that came from Natives from northwest Alaska that was published by William Oquilluk.
The book Oquilluk discusses four past myths that are linked to the imminent extinction of all living in the northwest of Alaska. The two previous events are too long for researchers to speculate what they could be. The fourth, and the most recent catastrophe was the flu epidemic in 1918, which struck Alaska as well as all of world severely.
Researchers argued that the third calamity that occurred in northwest Alaska was a result of an Iceland eruption. Oquilluk described the event by calling it “The Time Summer Time Did Not Arrive.”
It was the year 1783 or so, the migratory birds been returning in Alaska at the beginning of spring. And everything was normal, up until the end of June. And then, “suddenly it turned into colder temperatures” which meant that people “could not hunt or fishing,” Oquilluk wrote.
“In the space of a few weeks the rivers and lakes that had recently thawed, frozen over. The warm weather wouldn’t return until the spring (early the month of April) of the following season,” scientists from Lamont-Doherty scientists published.
