Alaska’s Year Without a Summer

Two-hundred and thirty-six years ago, when General George Washington marched back into New York City as British troops were walking out, a volcano erupted in Iceland.

For eight months of 1783, Laki volcano spewed lava and belched noxious fumes into the atmosphere. One-quarter of the residents of Iceland died, and the sulfur-rich gases that spread worldwide reflected the sun’s rays, making many places on Earth cooler.

Using evidence held in white spruce trees, researchers think the Laki eruption was a catastrophe for northwest Alaska residents, who had no idea why their July turned into November that year.

Rosanne D’Arrigo of the tree-ring lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York recently told the story of Alaska’s year without a summer. She attended the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month in Washington, D.C.

On a poster in a cavernous meeting hall there, she displayed a photo of tree rings from a white spruce tree from Alaska. Amid a series of dark lines is a faint one that lines up with the year 1783.

Tree rings are thick-walled cells that form in conifers late in the growing season. The hard-to-see tree ring in D’Arrigo’s example shows a most unusual year, 1783, amid centuries of normal spruce growth.

D’Arrigo, Alaska archaeologist Karen Workman and the late Gordon Jacoby once wrote of a “disaster for northwest Alaska Inuit” caused by the Laki eruption and the cold temperatures that followed. The scientists based their conclusion in large part on cores of wood pulled from white spruce trees at northern treeline.

James Louis Giddings gathered many of those plugs.

In June of 1940, Giddings, an archaeologist and mining engineer educated at UAF, flew from Fairbanks to Allakaket. Once in that small village, he aimed his compass at a mountain pass across the Koyukuk River that would lead him to the headwaters of the Kobuk River.

Giddings then started walking. He carried a 40-pound pack and a .22 rifle, along with “a change of heavy underclothes one must wear as mosquito protection.”

He lashed together a log raft when he reached the Kobuk River. He floated its length, taking tree cores along the way and stopping at known and possible archaeological sites.

At the mouth of the Kobuk, he turned right and traveled up the Noatak River. When Giddings was finished there, he went on to the Seward Peninsula, not finishing his scientific journey until he walked into the town of Haycock, not far from today’s village of Koyuk.