Earthquakes, fires, floods, eruptions, and the human responses to them.
99 stories in this theme.
At 09:15 on 21 October 1966, colliery waste tip No. 7 above the Welsh village of Aberfan liquefied and slid downhill, engulfing Pantglas Junior School minutes after morning assembly. 144 people died, 116 of them children. The National Coal Board had been warned about the tip — and later raided the disaster fund to pay for removing the others.
Read the story →At its height around 1200, Greater Angkor covered some 1,000 km² and may have held close to a million people, sustained by a vast engineered water network. By the mid-15th century the court was gone to the south. Not 'lost' — Angkor Wat never ceased to be a shrine — the city was undone, modern research suggests, by its own infrastructure meeting megadroughts and floods.
Read the story →In late May 526, during the crowds of Ascension week, an earthquake levelled Antioch — then among the greatest cities of the Roman East — and the fire that followed burned most of what stood. The chroniclers' toll of 250,000 is likely inflated but marks a catastrophe of extraordinary scale. The patriarch died; his successor was chosen from the rubble.
Read the story →When Nevado del Ruiz erupted on 13 November 1985, its melting ice cap sent lahars — volcanic mudflows — down river valleys onto the sleeping town of Armero, Colombia. Around 23,000 of its 29,000 inhabitants died. Hazard maps had predicted the flow path almost exactly; evacuation never happened.
Read the story →The Dutch East India ship Batavia wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off Western Australia on 4 June 1629. While the commander sailed an open boat to Java for rescue, the apothecary Jeronimus Cornelisz established a reign of terror among the roughly 200 survivors, murdering some 110-125 men, women, and children before soldiers he had marooned fought back.
Read the story →At approximately 12:30 on 15 January 1919 a steel tank holding 2.3 million gallons of molasses ruptured in Boston's North End. The wave — estimated at 25 feet high, moving at 35 mph — killed 21 people, injured 150, and levelled buildings along Commercial Street.
Read the story →On 1 September 1859 astronomer Richard Carrington watched a white flash erupt on the Sun. Within a day the largest geomagnetic storm on record hit Earth — auroras were seen near the equator, telegraph lines sparked and shocked their operators, and some circuits ran on auroral current alone. A repeat today would be a global infrastructure disaster.
Read the story →On 12 January 1888 an unseasonably mild morning lured children across the Great Plains to school in light clothes. That afternoon a violent cold front dropped temperatures by more than 20 degrees in hours and swallowed the prairie in blinding powder snow. An estimated 235 people died, many of them children caught walking home.
Read the story →In February 1959 nine experienced Soviet ski-hikers died on the slope of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Urals. Their tent was found cut open from the inside; the bodies lay up to 1.5 km away, some barefoot in the snow, some with severe internal injuries. Sixty years of theories followed. The modern scientific verdict is a slab avalanche.
Read the story →In July 1184 King Henry VI convened an assembly at Erfurt to settle a feud. The packed upper floor collapsed, dropping dozens of nobles through the storey below and into the cesspit beneath the building. Around 60 died, most drowned in the latrine. The king survived by sitting in a stone window alcove.
Read the story →At 11:58 on 1 September 1923, two minutes before noon, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama region as the city's lunch fires were lit. Firestorms did most of the killing — including some 38,000 people incinerated by a fire whirl at a single open square. Around 105,000 died; in the chaos, mobs massacred thousands of Koreans.
Read the story →From 5 to 9 December 1952 a windless anticyclone trapped London's coal smoke at street level. Visibility fell to arm's length, transport stopped, and cattle died at Smithfield. The official count was around 4,000 deaths; modern analyses put the toll at 10,000-12,000. It produced the Clean Air Act of 1956.
Read the story →On 15 January 2022 the submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai erupted with a blast heard in Alaska, 9,700 km away. Its plume reached 57 km — the first ever observed to enter the mesosphere — its pressure wave circled the Earth for days, and it injected an unprecedented mass of water vapour into the stratosphere. Tonga was cut off from the world for days by a severed cable.
Read the story →When the potato blight destroyed Ireland's staple crop from 1845, around one million people died and well over a million emigrated, while grain and livestock continued to be exported under armed guard. Ireland's population fell by a quarter and has never returned to its pre-famine level — the demographic scar is still on the map.
Read the story →Five weeks after opening, Chicago's Iroquois Theatre — advertised as "absolutely fireproof" — burned during a matinee packed with women and children. Locked gates, inward-opening doors, and unfinished fire equipment killed 602 people in about twenty minutes, the deadliest single-building fire in US history.
Read the story →On the night of 21 August 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in a rare limnic eruption. The invisible, ground-hugging cloud flowed down the valleys and suffocated 1,746 people and some 3,500 head of livestock, most without waking.
Read the story →On 17 October 1814 a fermentation vat holding over 130,000 gallons of porter ruptured at the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. The chain reaction released more than 300,000 gallons of beer into the St Giles rookery, killing eight people.
Read the story →In July 1816 the French frigate Medusa — commanded by an incompetent émigré appointee — ran aground off West Africa. The privileged took the boats; 147 people were cast off on a makeshift raft. Thirteen days later 15 were alive, having survived mutiny, murder, and cannibalism. Géricault's enormous painting of the raft turned the scandal into immortal art.
Read the story →On 24 June 1812 the Grande Armée — over 600,000 men from a dozen nations — crossed the Niemen into Russia. Borodino was carnage, Moscow burned around them, and the winter retreat destroyed the army: barely a tenth recrossed the frontier. It broke Napoleon's empire and produced, in Minard's chart of the shrinking army, perhaps the most famous data graphic ever drawn.
Read the story →Fresh from Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps promised a sea-level canal through Panama. Yellow fever and malaria killed on the order of 22,000 workers; the company collapsed in 1889 with the savings of 800,000 French investors; and the bribery scandal that followed shook the Third Republic. The United States finished the canal only after conquering the mosquito.
Read the story →On the night of 22 October 1707, a Royal Navy fleet returning from the Mediterranean — its position miscalculated — drove onto the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. Four ships and up to 2,000 men were lost, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell among them. The catastrophe pushed Parliament to the Longitude Act of 1714 and its £20,000 prize.
Read the story →The steamboat Sultana, legally certified for 376 people, was carrying more than 2,100 — most of them Union soldiers just released from Confederate prison camps — when her patched boiler exploded on the Mississippi above Memphis on 27 April 1865. Around 1,200 died, more than on the Titanic, in a week when the newspapers were full of Lincoln's funeral and the death of John Wilkes Booth.
Read the story →Shortly after midnight on 10 June 1886, Mount Tarawera in New Zealand split open along a 17-kilometre rift. The eruption killed around 120 people, buried the village of Te Wairoa, and obliterated the Pink and White Terraces — silica formations then celebrated as the eighth wonder of the world. Eleven days earlier, tourists reported meeting a phantom war canoe on the lake.
Read the story →On 18 March 1925 a single immense tornado tracked some 350 kilometres across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana in three and a half hours, killing 695 people — the deadliest tornado in US history. Official forecasts of the era were forbidden to use the word "tornado."
Read the story →The Vasa, the most expensively armed warship in the world, capsized in Stockholm harbour on 10 August 1628 after sailing barely 1,300 metres, killing around 30 people. Everyone knew she was unstable; nobody could tell the king. Raised in 1961, she is now the world's best-preserved 17th-century ship.
Read the story →At a children's variety show in Sunderland on 16 June 1883, an announcement that children with certain tickets would receive prizes sent over a thousand children from the gallery racing downstairs — into a door bolted to open only child-wide. 183 children aged roughly three to fourteen were crushed. The law requiring outward-opening exits followed.
Read the story →On the morning of 30 May 1626 the Wanggongchang Armoury — a major gunpowder works inside Beijing — detonated, devastating roughly two square kilometres of the capital and killing a reported 20,000 people. The emperor's infant heir died in the aftermath; contemporary accounts are so strange that theories still multiply around one of the largest accidental explosions of the pre-industrial world.
Read the story →Apollo 1 was a ground rehearsal test, not a launch. At 6:31 p.m. on 27 January 1967 a spark in the pressurised pure-oxygen cabin atmosphere ignited Velcro and nylon webbing. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died of asphyxiation within seventeen seconds. The hatch design — inward-opening, requiring 90 seconds to remove — could not be opened against the internal pressure spike.
Read the story →Approximately 27 tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a storage tank at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal between approximately 23:00 on 2 December and 02:00 on 3 December 1984. The toxic cloud spread across adjacent shantytowns. The Indian government's official immediate death toll is 3,787. Independent estimates of total deaths from acute and chronic exposure reach 20,000 or more.
Read the story →The Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven crew. The proximate cause was the failure of a rubber O-ring seal on the right solid rocket booster at the unusually cold overnight launch temperature. The engineers at the manufacturer Morton Thiokol had argued against the launch for thermal reasons the night before; they had been overruled by their own management on a NASA conference call.
Read the story →The RBMK-1000 reactor at Chernobyl Reactor Block 4 exploded at 1:23:40 a.m. on 26 April 1986 during a poorly-managed safety test. The reactor lid blew off. Graphite moderator caught fire. The 10-day fire released approximately 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Approximately 350,000 people were eventually evacuated permanently from the 30-km exclusion zone.
Read the story →The Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, at 00:04 local time on 24 March 1989. Approximately 41,600 cubic metres (260,000 barrels) of Alaska North Slope crude oil spilled into the sound. The spill killed an estimated 250,000 seabirds and remained the largest US coastal oil spill until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Read the story →The 11 March 2011 earthquake off northeastern Honshu produced a 14-metre tsunami that overwhelmed the seawall of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant at 15:41 local time. Backup diesel generators flooded within minutes. Without cooling, three reactor cores went into meltdown over the substantial subsequent four days. The displaced population was about 154,000.
Read the story →The PS General Slocum caught fire in the East River off East 90th Street at approximately 10:00 a.m. on 15 June 1904. About 1,300 mostly German-American passengers from the St Mark's Lutheran Church annual Sunday-school picnic were aboard. The fire hoses were rotted, the life jackets were filled with cork dust packed with iron weights to meet the legal weight requirement, and 1,021 people died — most of them women and children.
Read the story →A fire began at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666. By the time it was extinguished on 6 September it had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and St Paul's Cathedral across approximately 175 hectares — about four-fifths of the City of London. The documented death toll is six. The actual toll was probably higher but cannot now be reconstructed.
Read the story →The German hydrogen airship LZ-129 Hindenburg caught fire on its final mooring approach at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey, at 7:25 p.m. on 6 May 1937. The 245-metre airship burned to the ground in approximately 37 seconds. 36 of 97 people aboard died. The disaster ended commercial passenger airship aviation. Radio broadcaster Herbert Morrison's live recording — "oh, the humanity" — became the first major audio news broadcast in history.
Read the story →The Plague of Justinian reached Constantinople in spring 542 CE from Egypt and Pelusium. Procopius records a peak mortality of about 5,000 deaths per day in Constantinople. Modern genetic analysis of plague burials at Aschheim in Bavaria confirmed in 2013 that the pathogen was Yersinia pestis — the same bacterium that caused the 14th-century Black Death. The empire-wide death toll is estimated at 25-50 percent of population.
Read the story →Vladimir Komarov launched in Soyuz 1 on 23 April 1967 knowing the spacecraft had 203 documented engineering faults. He flew it anyway because the backup pilot was Yuri Gagarin and Komarov refused to let Gagarin take the risk. After 18 orbits the descent module's main parachute failed to deploy. Komarov hit the Orenburg Steppe at approximately 140 km/h and was killed instantly. He was 40.
Read the story →An earthquake-triggered landslide on the north face of Mount St Helens at 08:32:11 PDT on 18 May 1980 unblocked a pressurised magma chamber. The resulting lateral blast removed approximately 400 metres of the volcano's summit, levelled 600 square kilometres of forest, and killed 57 people. It is the deadliest volcanic event in US history.
Read the story →A fire began in the wooden Circus Maximus shops in Rome on the night of 18-19 July 64 CE. It burned for six days and destroyed three of Rome's fourteen districts completely, with substantial damage to seven more. Emperor Nero was at his villa in Antium when the fire began and returned to Rome to organise relief. The story that he "fiddled" while it burned was a hostile reconstruction recorded by Suetonius decades later.
Read the story →Samuel Pepys kept his shorthand diary from January 1660 to May 1669. The 1665 entries — running through the worst of the Great Plague that killed approximately 100,000 Londoners — are the closest surviving day-to-day record of how the plague moved through the city, how the parish authorities tried to contain it, and how an educated middle-rank professional Londoner adjusted his daily routines around an active mass-mortality epidemic.
Read the story →Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four American commercial flights on the morning of 11 September 2001. Two crashed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan; one into the Pentagon outside Washington; one into a Pennsylvania field after passenger resistance. 2,977 people died. The American response — the War on Terror, the Afghanistan invasion of October 2001, the Iraq invasion of 2003 — substantially shaped the next two decades.
Read the story →The 1918 influenza pandemic killed approximately 50 million people across three waves from spring 1918 to spring 1920. The death toll exceeded the First World War casualty figure. The "Spanish flu" name reflects neutral Spanish press coverage, not a Spanish origin. The viral strain (H1N1) was reconstructed from preserved Alaskan tissue in 2005.
Read the story →The White Star liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. on 14 April 1912 and sank at 2:20 a.m. on 15 April. Of 2,224 people aboard, 1,517 died. The ship carried lifeboats for 1,178 — about half the maximum capacity. The disaster substantially changed maritime safety regulation.
Read the story →A fire began on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village at 4:40 p.m. on Saturday 25 March 1911. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The exit doors had been locked from the outside to prevent theft. 146 garment workers died — most of them young immigrant women — in 18 minutes. The disaster produced the first New York State factory-safety legislation.
Read the story →A magnitude 8.5–9.0 earthquake struck Lisbon at approximately 9.40 AM on 1 November 1755 — All Saints Day, when the city's churches were full. The earthquake, the fires that followed, and the tsunami forty minutes later killed approximately 30,000 to 50,000 people. The European Enlightenment never substantially recovered the cosmic optimism of the early 18th century.
Read the story →A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the Strait of Messina at 5:20 AM on 28 December 1908, followed by a 12-metre tsunami three minutes later. The combined event destroyed approximately 90% of Messina and substantial portions of Reggio Calabria, killing about 80,000 people. It remains the deadliest earthquake in modern European history.
Read the story →A Belgian refrigerated truck carrying flour and margarine caught fire approximately 6 km into the Mont Blanc road tunnel on the morning of 24 March 1999. The 12 km tunnel had no ventilated emergency-refuge shelters and no continuous fire-suppression system. The fire burned for 53 hours at temperatures reaching 1,000°C. Thirty-nine people died.
Read the story →The Mur de la peste was a dry-stone wall approximately 27 km long, with guard posts at 100-metre intervals, built across the limestone garrigue of the Comtat Venaissin between September 1720 and August 1721. It enforced the cordon sanitaire that kept the Marseille plague from spreading north into the French interior.
Read the story →The Chevalier Nicolas Roze organised the clearing of approximately 1,200 plague corpses from the Esplanade de la Tourette at Marseille in September 1720. He used condemned galley convicts as labour, promising their freedom if they survived. Eight of his hundred labourers did.
Read the story →Pliny the Elder commanded the Roman naval fleet at Misenum on 24 August 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted. He ordered the fleet to evacuate civilians from the affected shore. He died on the beach at Stabiae approximately twenty hours later, probably of a heart attack triggered by inhaled volcanic gas. His nephew Pliny the Younger wrote the eyewitness account.
Read the story →The Tay Bridge opened in 1878 as the longest railway bridge in the world — about 3.2 km across the Firth of Tay between Dundee and Wormit. Nineteen months later, on the evening of 28 December 1879, its central high girders collapsed in a violent gale with the Edinburgh-Dundee passenger train passing across. All 75 people on board died.
Read the story →Louis-Auguste Cyparis was the most famous of the two survivors of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption. He was recruited by Barnum & Bailey's Circus in 1903, toured the United States as "the man who lived through doomsday" for the next eight years, and died in obscurity in Panama in 1929.
Read the story →The 1815 Tambora eruption destroyed the small Sumbawan kingdom of Tambora and killed its entire population of approximately 12,000 people. The Tambora language — a Papuan rather than Austronesian tongue, unrelated to all other documented Indonesian languages — died with them. Only a 48-word vocabulary survives.
Read the story →Vesuvius erupted between 17 and 23 March 1944, while Allied forces were operating from a temporary airbase at Pompeii Airfield approximately 8 km from the volcano. The eruption's ashfall destroyed approximately 80 American B-25 medium bombers parked at the field — the largest single-event loss of American aircraft to a non-combat cause in the European theatre.
Read the story →Giovanni Boccaccio opened the *Decameron* with one of the most famous descriptions of a medieval plague pit ever written. Modern Florentine osteoarchaeology has identified a 14th-century mass-burial site beneath the Santa Maria Novella complex that matches the *Decameron*'s description in unsettling detail.
Read the story →While the [Great Famine of 1315–1322](/articles/great-famine-1315-1322) was reducing the European wheat supply, a rinderpest-like cattle disease was simultaneously killing 60–80% of the European cattle population. The two crises compounded each other. The 1318 bovine pestilence is one of the largest livestock mortality events in European history.
Read the story →Gabriele de' Mussis's *Historia de Morbo* (c. 1348) is the source of the famous story that the Mongol khan Jani Beg ended the 1346 siege of Caffa by catapulting plague-infected corpses over the walls. De' Mussis was not at Caffa. The corpse-catapult story may be a literary invention. The Black Death still arrived in Italy from Caffa.
Read the story →Captain Charles de Guillebon was the master of the French Liberty ship *Grandcamp* when fire broke out in its hold of 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate at Texas City on 16 April 1947. He refused to flood the hold for fear of losing the cargo. The ship blew up at 9:12 AM. Everyone aboard died.
Read the story →The Door Peninsula firestorm of 8 October 1871 swept the eastern shore of Green Bay Wisconsin the same night as the Peshtigo Fire. It killed approximately 150 people, destroyed the towns of Brussels and Williamsonville, and was completely overshadowed by both the larger Peshtigo Fire and the simultaneous Great Chicago Fire.
Read the story →Between the spring and the autumn of 1665, plague killed roughly 70,000 to 100,000 Londoners — about a quarter of the city's population. It was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England. Six months later the Great Fire burned down most of the worst-affected districts.
Read the story →The *Grand Saint-Antoine* arrived at Marseille on 25 May 1720 with a hold full of Levantine silk and several already-dead crew members. The harbour authorities knew the ship was infected. They cleared it anyway. The resulting outbreak killed about half of Marseille and approximately 100,000 people across Provence over two years.
Read the story →Konrad of Megenberg was a Bavarian cleric and natural philosopher who wrote a Latin treatise during the 1349 Black Death arguing on medical and theological grounds that the well-poisoning accusations against European Jews were factually false. The treatise circulated in fewer than two dozen manuscript copies and had substantially no documented effect on the simultaneous massacres.
Read the story →La Soufrière on Saint Vincent erupted on 6 May 1902 — about thirty hours before Mount Pelée destroyed Saint-Pierre on Martinique. The Soufrière eruption killed approximately 1,500 people across the northern parishes of the island. The simultaneous Pelée catastrophe entirely overshadowed the coverage.
Read the story →Lake Cheko is a 500-metre-wide elliptical lake about 8 km northwest of the Tunguska blast epicentre. In 2007 an Italian research team proposed that the lake is the impact crater of a small unfragmented portion of the 1908 Tunguska body. The interpretation is substantially contested.
Read the story →The 1881 Michigan Thumb Fire burned a million acres of the Lower Peninsula in five days, killed 282 people, and triggered the first major fundraising drive of Clara Barton's new American Red Cross. It became the policy template for what would eventually be the U.S. Forest Service's wildfire-management framework.
Read the story →A major earthquake struck Pompeii on 5 February 62 AD, doing substantial damage across the city and the neighbouring Vesuvian region. Most of it was still under repair when Vesuvius erupted seventeen years later. Modern volcanology now reads the 62 AD earthquake as the unheeded magmatic-warning sign of the 79 AD catastrophe.
Read the story →An earthquake struck Rhodes in approximately 226 BC, knocking down the Colossus, damaging substantial portions of the city walls, and producing widespread Aegean damage. The Hellenistic kings of Egypt, Macedon, Syria, and Pergamon all sent substantial financial and material aid — the first known case of coordinated international disaster diplomacy.
Read the story →The Spörer Minimum was a period of unusually low solar activity that ran from approximately 1450 to 1540. It overlapped with the catastrophic late-medieval collapse of Norse Greenland, the worst phase of the Little Ice Age in central Europe, and the agricultural crisis that preceded the religious upheavals of the Reformation.
Read the story →When [Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD](/articles/vesuvius-pompeii-79), it buried a Roman seaside villa at Herculaneum under 25 metres of pyroclastic debris. Inside the villa was a working library of about 1,800 papyrus scrolls — the only intact classical library that has ever been recovered. The scrolls were carbonised by the heat. Modern X-ray imaging is finally reading them.
Read the story →At 8:43 AM on 6 December 1917, Halifax telegraph dispatcher [Vince Coleman](/articles/halifax-explosion-1917) stayed at his post to warn an inbound passenger train that the burning munitions ship in the harbour was about to explode. The explosion killed him about a minute later. The brass-and-wood telegraph key he typed his last message on now lives in a glass case in Gatineau, Quebec.
Read the story →Alfred Lacroix arrived on Martinique six weeks after the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée had killed thirty thousand people. He spent the next four years on the island reconstructing exactly what had happened. The science of volcanology, more or less, is what he found.
Read the story →On 15 February 2013 a 20-metre stony asteroid exploded over the southern Russian Urals at an altitude of about 30 kilometres. The blast injured 1,500 people, mostly from flying glass. It was the largest atmospheric impact event since Tunguska in 1908 — and the first to be captured on car-dashboard video.
Read the story →Cholera had been an endemic disease of the Ganges delta for centuries. In 1817 it suddenly became a global pandemic — moving across Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and eventually Europe over six years. The trigger was probably the Tambora eruption of 1815 disrupting Bengali agriculture two years earlier.
Read the story →The Crystal Palace housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, was moved to a south London hill, and stood there for eighty-five years. On the night of 30 November 1936 it caught fire and burned to the ground in a single evening. Two hundred thousand people watched.
Read the story →Daniel Defoe was five years old during the Great Plague of London in 1665. He published *A Journal of the Plague Year* in 1722 as if it were the first-person account of an eyewitness. Critics took a hundred and fifty years to figure out that he had invented most of it.
Read the story →In June 1783 a 27-kilometre fissure opened in southern Iceland and erupted for eight months. It killed about a fifth of Iceland's population. The sulphur cloud killed an estimated 23,000 in England. The crop failures it caused across Europe fed directly into the French Revolution of 1789.
Read the story →In 1257 an Indonesian volcano called Samalas erupted with the largest eruption of the last seven thousand years. The sulphate signal appears in polar ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. Medieval European chronicles record the cold summer of 1258. It took until 2013 to identify the source.
Read the story →Between 1347 and 1351 a pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone in Europe. Contemporaries called it the Great Mortality. It was the largest single demographic event in recorded human history.
Read the story →In 1274 and again in 1281, Kublai Khan sent invasion fleets against Japan. Both times — once after a single battle and once after seven weeks of fighting — typhoons destroyed the Mongol ships. The Japanese called the wind divine.
Read the story →Stamford Raffles spent a decade governing Java, founded Singapore, and was the most important English Asianist of his generation. He lost his Sumatran governorship, his fortune, four of his five children, and most of his collection in a single bad year.
Read the story →On 24 October 79 AD Vesuvius opened above the Bay of Naples and buried two Roman towns under twenty feet of pumice and ash. The people who died in Pompeii were killed in the first wave of the second day, by a cloud of superheated gas at six hundred degrees Celsius.
Read the story →The rain started in May 1315 and did not stop. Across northern Europe the harvest failed for three years running. By 1317 cities were locking up their own children.
Read the story →On the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, a wildfire two hundred and fifty kilometers north killed five times as many people. Almost nobody heard about it.
Read the story →The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →Between 1645 and 1715 the surface of the Sun was nearly blank. Sunspot counts dropped to almost zero. Europe froze. Astronomers noticed, then forgot.
Read the story →On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
Read the story →On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.
Read the story →On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
Read the story →On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.
Read the story →Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →On 16 April 1947 a French freighter loaded with fertilizer caught fire at a Texas dock. Everyone but Captain de Guillebon ran. He fought the fire.
Read the story →On 6 December 1917, Vince Coleman had ninety seconds to warn the incoming trains. He used them, and then he was gone.
Read the story →On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
Read the story →