Interesting side note:

While reading what I have about the Icelandic eruption (I'm sick of typing Eyjafjallajökull... really sick), I came across this little tid-bit:

In 1815, Tambora erupts and spews the equivalent of 40 square miles of earth into the atmosphere, with the ash column estimated at more than 35,000 feet high. The final explosion was so huge, it could be heard (clearly) as far as 1,700 miles away, and the pressure wave it released circled the globe and effected barometers on the other side of the world SEVEN TIMES. This was a big eruption, to say the least.

The effects of this eruption were so huge, that it caused snow to fall in the month of July, 1816 right here in Pennsylvania, and every single state in the American North East saw massive crop devastation due to killer frosts hitting all through the spring and summer months. Ice formed on the Thames River in June, and hundreds of thousands of people starved as famine swept through post-Napoleonic War Europe (which was already suffering from massive economic depression brought on by the war itself). Brown snow fell in Hungary as late as August, 1816, physical evidence of the SO2 excess in the upper atmosphere.

Back here in the US, the State of Vermont was particularly touched by the climate change. Massive crop failures swept the State, and entire communities were forced to pack up and move to regions less effected by the changing weather. Many of these families found the distress and heart-ache of such forced migration so painful that they sought renewed hope and inspiration from their Puritan-religious roots, and the Great Revival of American Protestant fundamentalism found its beginnings. One family moved to western New York State, specifically to the town of Palmyra, where a young treasure hunter and visionary (and convicted felon, shockingly enough) named Joseph Smith would found the Mormon faith after finding the "Golden Plates" at the direction of an archangel.

Who says that events in the distant past have no bearing on today's world? Right here, in this topic of volcanic eruptions, we find a contributing effect nearly 200 years old that indirectly led to the foundation of one of the faiths that has molded one of our own Bund members, and directly effected tens of millions of people, both then AND now.

THAT is why I love history!