FORGOTTEN recent history NATURAL DISASTERS DOOM!

The Carrington event (1859) was no big deal because the only thing that used electricity at the time was the telegraph.

Today it would mean the end of the world as we know it!

Millions or billions dead from starvation alone.

5 stars dude.

If the New Madrid quakes of 1811-1812 ever repeat along the Mississippi river, it will be unprecedented American disaster. This time it will involve nuclear power plants, chemical factories, and city buildings.

Also of interest is the 1983 very near failure of the Glen Canyon Dam, which is upriver from the Hoover dam and Las Vegas and the overflow land terrain to Cali's agriculture where so much of our produce is grown. ( read " The Emerald Mile" for a spellbinding account).

5 stars dude.

If the New Madrid quakes of 1811-1812 ever repeat along the Mississippi river, it will be unprecedented American disaster. This time it will involve nuclear power plants, chemical factories, and city buildings.

Also of interest is the 1983 very near failure of the Glen Canyon Dam, which is upriver from the Hoover dam and Las Vegas and the overflow land terrain to Cali's agriculture where so much of our produce is grown. ( read " The Emerald Mile" for a spellbinding account).

I saw your Laki thread, I'm glad to see another one. I spent a few evenings looking into the Laki event. I even watched some lectures about volcanism in Iceland. lol

[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Another lecture here

Nature as Historical Protagonist

What role did natural environmental processes, both physical and biological, play in shaping the course of economic development over the last millennium and longer? Historical accounts often overlook the independent influence that natural agencies could exercise upon the supply of and demand for resources, via their effects upon the reproduction, health, and life expectancy of humans and the domesticated plants and animals required for subsistence.

Bruce M. S. Campbell explores the significant environmental component to the course of pre-industrial economic development, investigating the comparisons between the chronologies of prices, wages, grain harvests and the corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climactic variations, taking into consideration dendrochronology, the Greenland ice cores and the episode of the Black Death.

[link to www.ehs.org.uk]
more reading

[link to www.open.edu]

An even larger Icleandic one happened around the years AD 935-940.


Fascinating stuff. Of course everyone knows about Vesuvius and Pompeii.

But maybe not the Bronze Age eruption of Thera.


I was planning on looking into the 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora


also
1883 Krakatoa


[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]


Cool topic OP. Thanks :)

Great thread OP! 5 stars and a pin request. :)

As for natural disasters, the worst would probably be Hillary Clinton, lol.

Seriously, the 1931 Floods in China killed and estimated 3-4 million people. :(

[link to en.m.wikipedia.org (secure)]

Another one would be the Smallpox epidemic.

[link to en.m.wikipedia.org (secure)]

Just started this thread & wanted to say thank you before I get into the 2nd post!
This is fascinating and why I lurk here! This is an education & I am grateful OP!!

Cool, I did a shameless self bump on this and my Laki thread, as I know this is the sort of thing a lot of people visit here for, unfortunately not enough of this natural disaster stuff is posted, and there are always people who don't know about some of these not so distant past events. It's become far to political on here of late, and not even interesting political stuff, just stupid, he said, she said, shite...

Ha ha at least the Clinton Catastrophe never happened!

Ha ha at least the Clinton Catastrophe never happened!

Exactly! This place is not what it used to be. We always had the loons, but the tone wasn't so damn nasty overall. I come in search of these kinds of things. So again, thank you!
I just finished the whole thing & learned a lot.
What is with this collective amnesia? Maybe it explains my fear of earthquakes, from the first time I ever heard of them as a kid?
I have felt EQs in S Cal, Portland, Okinawa & Phx. All types. None too large & I pretty much gasped, when I read some of those lasted almost 10 minutes! I'd have a heart attack! I wonder how much loss of life is from being scared to death?

Recent lack of large events is disturbing...

I was thinking about this today.