Successive volcanic eruptions (1809–1815) and two severe famines of Korea (1809–1810, 1814–1815) seen through historical records

Abstract

Based on the government’s historical records and personal documents of the pre-modern Chosŏn Dynasty, this paper examines the socio-economic impacts in Korea in response to climatic variability from 1809 until 1819 that may have been influenced to some degree by the eruption of the “unknown volcano” (1809) and the Tambora eruption (1815). In the early 1800s, when volcanic eruptions occurred successively, the Korean Peninsula experienced a temporal precipitation variation—drought, abundant rainfall, and normalcy—twice. The precipitation variation in this period had a heavy impact on the yields of rice, major crop on the peninsula. In the phase of drought in 1809 and extreme climatic anomalies in 1814, the country suffered record poor harvests, and in the abundant rainfall phase in 1810 and 1816–1817, it had bumper crops. For this reason, 1816–1817 were the halcyon years for Korea, unlike the case of Europe and the northeastern USA which suffered from extreme climatic anomalies in those years. This case of the Korean Peninsula indicates that the climate change and natural disasters of the 1810s were influenced by not only of the single event of the Tambora eruption but of the successive eruptions of volcanoes in the 7 years from 1809 to 1815, which also affected other areas on the globe for 11 years (1809–1819).