Catastrophic events in the Past

65 mya Iridium at the K-2 boundary evidence for a large meteor impact

740,000 ya explosion in the Long Valley Caldera, Calif. – the debris from the pyroclastic explosion has been found as far as Arkansas and Missouri.

Bronze Age catastrophe (Volcanic, possibly Thera) Minoan & Babylonian collapse

1500 BCE, Thira or Thera, Eruption in about 1500 B.C. may have destroyed Minoan civilization on Crete;

79, AD Vesuvius erupted.

The first recorded eruption occurred on Aug. 24, A.D. 79, when the cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae were covered by ashes and lava. An eyewitness account of the disaster was written by a Roman author, Pliny the Younger. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was killed during the eruption.

312 AD Constantine’s victory

540 AD Unknown period of 18 difficult years

1100 circa Yangtze River changed it course and mouth

1492, First eyewitness of a rock falling out of the sky (meteorite) striking in a French-German town, Entesheim

1669, Mt. Etna eruption, filled 20,000 people.

1794 meteor shower

April 1803, 3000 (nickel/ iron) stones fell on a French town

1815, Mount Tambora, eruption released 6 million times more energy than that of an atomic bomb; killed about 92,000 people, caused little ice age.

1877, Cotopaxi, eruption caused ashfalls and mudflows that killed about 1,000 people.

1883, Krakatoa, Sunda Straights; August 1883. The eruption killed about 36,000 people on nearby islands. It generated ocean waves of up to 130 feet (40 meters) high.

1887, The worst Huang Ho (4^th in world) flood occurred killing a (est.) million people

1902, Pelee, Martinique, Glowing cloud from 1902 eruption destroyed city of St.-Pierre, killing about 30,000 people in minutes.

1991, Pinatubo, Phillipines, Eruption in 1991, perhaps the largest of the 1900's, spewed about 20 million tons (18 million metric tons) of sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere.

2005, December: a Tsunami from a fault block slippage along the Indonesian island plate boundary sends a wave of water across the Indian ocean, the largest in recorded times killing thousands of unsuspecting residents and tourists of beach resorts in Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and Tanzania. Completely devastated Banda Ache, Java.

Technology index landscape index words index photograph index