MQ 2025

Martha's Quarterly
Issue 34
Winter 2025

The Year Without Summer

~8.125” x 8.5”

About the contributors:

Joanne Simpson was the first woman in the United States to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, which she received in 1949 from the University of Chicago. Simpson developed the first cloud model, discovered what makes hurricanes run, and revealed what drives the atmospheric currents in the tropics.

Chance Lockard is an artist, researcher, and volcano enthusiast based in New Haven, CT. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2024 and has been an assistant at Tammy Nguyen Studio ever since.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars (1) 

Can you imagine the darkest sky and the darkest night of your life? Maybe there was a blackout and the night was clear, so when you looked outside, there wasn’t even the slightest grey of a cloud.  The silence of this darkness has no hum, not a single light in your house is lit, not even the LED that lets you know your TV is idle.  

Last month this happened at my house in Connecticut where a slushy winter storm was immediately followed by freezing rain. By morning, every structure outside: the gutters below the roof, the bumper of cars, the branches of trees, and every single leaf still surviving the winter, were covered in icicles.  All around, nature and everything man-made was covered in ice diamonds.  All was magical until stronger winds started to bluster through the environment causing these shards of ice to fall and break.  Some icicles weighed telephone lines down so much that they caused small explosions in various electric boxes.  One of these boxes was connected to my house, and that was when we experienced the silent darkness after the sunset.  

The two lines excerpted at the beginning of this text are the first two lines of Lord Byron’s poem Darkness written in 1816, or “The Year Without Summer” which is the name of this issue of Martha’s Quarterly, Winter 2025.  The poem paints a dire picture of a society suffering from starvation and depression.  The context from which Byron created this poem was a much deeper darkness than what I experienced this winter. 

A year prior, in 1815, Mount Tambora had erupted in Indonesia. The explosion was so large that it cast enough sulfur into Earth’s atmosphere to reduce the planet’s temperature and form a cloud of dust over Europe. This led to famine, recession, and misery across the continent.  In this darkness, Lord Byon’s poem continued: 

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; (2)

I learned about Tambora as I was reading Carl Sagan and Richard Turco’s book, A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms where the authors provided copious anecdotes of natural and historical events that could compare to the unimaginable realities of a nuclear winter.  I couldn’t believe that an eruption in Southeast Asia could have dismal effects on Europe a year later, and it made the fantasy of a nuclear winter much more tangible and frightening.  

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread (3) 

Byron’s mention of “passions” is a subject I want to probe with this quarterly.  Martha's Quarterly, Issue 34, Winter 2025, The Year Without Summer, opens like a parachute.  The crater of Mount Tambora expands and then collects air while a small pamphlet covered in clouds anchors the whole zine down slowly, like someone escaping an aircraft.  Inside are two pieces of writing.  Underneath Mount Tambora’s crater is a summary by Chance Lockard of the catastrophic 1815 eruption. The small cloud pamphlet includes an article by meteorologist Joanne Simpson on cloud seeding.  The combination of these two phenomena, volcanic eruptions by nature and cloud seeding by man, aims to blur notions about the sublime by juxtaposing the profundity of events created by nature and by man.  When Byron’s poem mentioned forgotten passions, I thought about how recent catastrophes and global innovations have been a result of man’s unforgettable passions interwoven with nature’s forces.  

I have long been interested in geoengineers. The first Martha’s Quarterly that explored the subject was in the summer of 2017 in Giant Balloons.  Eight years later, I’m still awestruck by such grand human interventions with the planet’s weather and atmospheric patterns and characteristics.  Cloud seeding dates back to 1946 when Vincent Schafer of General Electric discovered that small pellets of dried ice could convert a supercooled water cloud into an ice cloud. This idea developed into several projects over the next decades, and in the 60s, Joanne Simpson and her team conducted several experiments that involved seeding cumulus clouds – puffy low-lying clouds that look like cotton balls– with silver iodide using pyrotechnic flares.  Some of these experiments resulted in significant rainfall.  Simpson concluded her article with this:  

Large-scale weather and climate modification– once a science fiction dream– may now be on our horizon.  (4) 

Simpson’s article was published in 1971, and today, in 2025, there are many proposals to intervene with the earth’s climate.   These include installing giant mirrors that orbit the Earth, spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere and modifying clouds, plants, and ice to make them more reflective. (5) 

Lord Byron’s Darkness ends like this: 
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe. (6) 

It’s important to note that I am presenting the subjects of Mount Tambora and cloud seeding in a chaotic time of war, economic uncertainty, and delicate cultural tensions.  I’m finishing this introduction the day before daylight savings time when the days become longer in the spring. This is partly because of the Earth’s tilt as it orbits the sun, but also because since World War I, the United States has practiced shifting the clock forward to extend the day, save fuel, and maximize the work day. Somewhere in between this 19th-century volcanic eruption and the weather-altering technology of the 20th-century is a place where man and nature must meet.  The kind of relationship man wants to have with nature and vice versa seems to lie at the heart of many existential troubles today, and I hope that our civilizations’ negotiations with nature will continue with the arrival of all seasons so that with all that dies in one generation, the next can thrive.  

– Tammy Nguyen

Note: To open and use the parachute zine, follow the steps demonstrated in the images on the front and back of this cover. 

1. Bryon, George Gordon. “Darkness.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b.

2. Bryon, George Gordon. “Darkness.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b.

3. Bryon, George Gordon. “Darkness.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b.

4. Simpson, Joanne. “Increasing Rainfall by Cloud Seeding.” The Science Teacher, vol. 38, no. 9, 1971, pp. 17–21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24120178.  

5. “Geoengineering: the basics.” Geoengineering Monitor, https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/what-is-geoengineering.

6. Bryon, George Gordon. “Darkness.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b.

Chance Lockard’s citations:

1. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, Princeton University Press, 2014.

2. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, “Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World,” Lecture presented at the Brigham Young University David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies, Provo, UT, September 2015.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

@passengerpigeonpress  

Martha’s Quarterly, Issue 34, Winter 2025, The Year Without Summer was produced using digital printing for all of its printed components.  The inner parachute, pamphlet, and outside cover were printed on 20 lb. paper. The fonts used throughout were Futura and Baskerville in different sizes and styles. “Increasing Rainfall by Cloud Seeding” by Joanne Simpson was reproduced with permission from The Science Teacher, December 1971, Vol. 38, No. 9, pp. 17-21. Copyright 1971 National Science Teaching Association. Tambora incident summary written by Chance Lockard. This issue was edited and designed by Tammy Nguyen and produced by Chance Lockard with assistance from Daniella Porras and Holly Greene.

Published in March 2025, this is an edition of 250.