Dusted Files

At 7:14 AM on June 30, 1908, an explosion above a remote Siberian river flattened 80 million trees and knocked a man off his feet 40 miles away. The pressure wave circled the Earth twice. Scientists took 19 years to reach the site. They found no crater.

In June 1816, snow fell in Vermont. Fourteen months earlier, a volcano in Indonesia had exploded with a force no eruption in recorded history has matched. The climate crisis killed hundreds of thousands. One cold summer on Lake Geneva gave the world Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the first post-apocalyptic story in English.

On January 12, 1888, children left for school across the Dakota Territory in mild weather. By afternoon, the temperature had dropped 40 degrees in thirty minutes. 235 people died — many frozen within sight of shelter they never found. No warning had been issued.