Laki is a volcanic fissure located in Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland. On June 08, 1783, the fissure opened and spewed forth a lot of steam from super heated groundwater. In addition to that, nearby volcano Grímsvötn, also erupted. Both of these events over an eight month period produced something like four tons of basalt lava, as well as clouds of noxious gasses. The result was contaminated soil and groundwater, leading to crop failure, the death of at least half the livestock in Iceland, and famine that killed a decent percentage of the human population. This massive event also impacted the rest of the world, mostly due to weather changes. The sky was filled with these noxious gasses, causing haze, terrible thunderstorms, high temperatures in summer, very low temperatures in winter, and drought in some locations.

This book was free to listen to on Audible Plus, so I gave it a try. It was a pretty short book. I think it was about five hours, so if you want something that isn't terribly long, this may be for you. I really want to travel to Iceland one day, and visit that national park. I love to see things that I have read about in general, so that would be a good opportunity to see Laki. I thought that this book was particularly interesting when reading about the impacts on weather throughout the world. I suppose that it never really occurred to me that something happening on one side of the world could affect something where I live so much. (Which in hindsight is really stupid because the smoke from wildfires in California certainly made it to Tennessee last season.) In the United States, there were reports of chunks of ice in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River was frozen. The snow in New Jersey was DEEP and the temperatures were below zero. All of this was happening at the end of the American Revolution, which is wild to think about. This was a pretty interesting book that I just happened to run across. I'm glad that I did.