From Volcanoes to Climate Change: Snow falls where it shouldn’t—and history reminds us it’s happened before.
Winter has been unforgiving this year. Blizzards. Extreme cold. Arctic blasts. Ice that just won’t melt. Snow in places unaccustomed to it. Florida, of all places, waking to frozen iguanas and frosty landscapes.
Whatever our theories about weather, moments like these have a way of reminding us how thin our assumptions really are. We tend to think of climate as something in the background— stable enough to plan around, dependable enough to ignore.
History suggests otherwise.
In April of 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa with a force so immense it altered global weather patterns. Ash and aerosols circled the earth, dimming sunlight and cooling temperatures far from the eruption itself and for far longer than anyone ever anticipated. The following year became known as the Year Without a Summer.
In 1816, snow fell in June across New England. Frost destroyed crops in July. Harvests failed across Europe. Food shortages, migrations, and unrest followed. None of this was caused by human industry or policy. It was the consequence of a single, distant natural event—unseen by most yet felt by millions.
In Virginia, even Thomas Jefferson meticulously noting seasonal conditions in his Monticello farm books, recorded a spring and summer that defied every expectation. By May 1816, average temperatures were well below normal, frequent frosts had already damaged fruit and young crops, and Jefferson forewarned that “the crops of wheat and tobacco will be poor.”
The bizarre weather did not relent with the calendar. Across the eastern United States, frost lingered deep into the late summer. Frost was reported in Virginia in late August, and rivers and lakes remained ice-cold as far north as northwestern Pennsylvania long after summer had traditionally begun.
What was most striking to observers at the time was not merely cold weather, but extreme variability — warm days quickly giving way to near-freezing nights and repeated frosts that decimated crops and upended agrarian life.
What makes 1816 so instructive is not simply the severity of the weather, but the bewilderment it produced. Farmers did not know why fields failed. Governments struggled to respond to conditions they could neither predict nor control. Writers, artists, and ordinary people alike were forced to reckon with a world suddenly less reliable than they had believed.
It was during that strange, cold summer that Mary Shelley began Frankenstein, confined indoors by relentless rain and gloom. Literature, as it often does, absorbed what history could not yet explain.
Periods like this complicate our modern instinct to narrate every hardship as preventable or every disruption as blameworthy. For much of human history, people lived with the understanding that nature was powerful, indifferent, and occasionally catastrophic. They adapted not because they believed they could master it—but because survival required flexibility, patience, and memory.
This is the world that shaped the early nineteenth century: a time when harvests could fail without warning, winters could extend beyond reason, and uncertainty was a constant companion. It is also the world that forms the backdrop of Masque of Honor, now returning to print—a world in which people understood that stability was provisional, and resilience was not optional.
When we write historical fiction, context matters. To impose modern expectations of predictability onto the past is to misunderstand how people actually lived. They did not experience weather as data or trend, but as immediate fact—something that could reorder lives overnight.
This winter, as cold settles where it is least expected, it is worth remembering that history is filled with such moments. Not as morality tales, but as reminders: the natural world has always had the final word. Our task, then as now, is not to control it—but to endure, adapt, and remember.
