The Volcano That Darkened Europe for 756 Years

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]In 1258, the sun did not appear over Europe for an entire summer. Crops failed. Tens of thousands died of famine. London buried 15,000 people in one mass grave.

[00:00:13]The cause was a volcano.

[00:00:15]No one knew which one for 756 years.

[00:00:19]For seven and a half centuries, scientists found the signature of the eruption in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. It was the largest volcanic spike in 2,000 years.

[00:00:31]But the volcano was missing.

[00:00:34]In 2013, a French volcanologist named Franck Lavigne found it. He matched the chemistry of the ice core sulfate to a single Indonesian crater lake, a 6-km-wide caldera on the island of Lombok.

[00:00:48]The mountain was called Samalas.

[00:00:50]The Plinian column was 40 km tall.

[00:00:53]Samalas threw 40 cubic kilometers of rock into the stratosphere.

[00:00:58]The mountain collapsed in on itself.

[00:01:00]The kingdom of Pamatan on its eastern slope was buried.

[00:01:05]The mass grave in London was found in the 1980s. They thought it was the Black Death.

[00:01:10]It wasn't. It was 100 years earlier, and it was caused by a mountain, not