Floods, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes: History’s Most Consequential Natural Catastrophes

18. A Massive Zone of Destruction

The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake opened up fissures up to 70 feet deep in the earth. The ground suddenly rose up in some place to form new hills, while in other places hills crumbled and subsided into valleys. 97 counties in Shaanxi and surrounding provinces were devastated. The earthquake destroyed nearly everything within an area more than 500 miles wide, and damage was inflicted as far as 310 miles from the epicenter. Aftershocks continued for six months. In many counties within the zone of destruction, over 60% of the population was killed outright, with many others injured, and all the survivors left without shelter.

17. Local Architecture Boosted the Lethality of This Catastrophe

The loss of life from the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake was extremely high because of local architecture and housing. Most of the region’s population took advantage of the soft loess soil, and built their homes out of earth shelters known as yaodongs – a form of artificial cave carved out of hillsides. On the positive side, such houses are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. However, they had the disadvantage of being particularly vulnerable to seismic activity. When the 1556 earthquake struck, they collapsed, with not only the weight of a roof falling upon the inhabitants, but an entire hillside falling on and burying whole communities. When it was over, around 830,000 had been killed, and millions more were injured and/or rendered homeless.

16. An Ancient Catastrophe

The Thera Eruption, circa 1642 – 1540 BC in what is today the Greek island of Santorini, was one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history. It was four times as powerful as the gigantic Krakatoa explosion of 1883. The eruption sundered the island of Thera, and wiped out the flourishing Minoan settlement of nearby Arkotiri and surrounding islands. It eventually gave rise to the legend of the vanished civilization of Atlantis, which was doomed by a natural catastrophe and swallowed by the sea. Beyond immediate impact and future legend, however, Thera’s eruption was one of history’s most consequential natural disasters. The consequences were not limited to the immediate area and era, but had knock on effects and produced a chain of causation that led directly to the world in which we live today.

15. A Disaster Followed by a Power Vacuum

In addition to the immediate devastation of Thera and nearby islands, the eruption produced powerful tsunamis that devastated Crete. That contributed to the decline of the island’s Minoan civilization, and paved the way for its extinction. At the time, the Minoans were the Mediterranean’s greatest naval power, as well as the dominant power of the Aegean, including what became Greece and the Greek world. A trading power, the Minoans were oriented towards Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, and were strongly influenced by those civilizations. While the Minoans flourished, the Aegean world in their thrall was by necessity oriented in the same direction, and strongly influenced by the Egyptian and eastern civilizations as well. The Thera eruption weakened Crete and the Minoans so much that a power vacuum was created in the Aegean. It was filled by the emerging Mycenaeans in mainland Greece.

14. A Catastrophe That Shaped the Western World’s Roots

The Mycenaeans conquered Crete, destroyed the Minoans, and became the Aegean’s dominant power. Unlike the Minoans, the Mycenaeans’ energies were not focused on trade with Egypt and the Levant. Instead, they were more interested in the colonization of the Aegean, the western coast of Asia Minor, the Black Sea coast, and the western Mediterranean. That change of orientation significantly reduced Egyptian and eastern influences upon the Greeks. When the Greek world flourished centuries later, long after the Mycenaeans had themselves disappeared, it did so as a civilization and culture distinct from those of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, rather than as extension and outpost of those civilizations. Since western civilization is founded upon that of the ancient Greeks, an argument could be made that today’s western civilization and its impact on the modern world would not exist but for the Thera eruption of the mid-second millennium BC.

13. From Catastrophe to Legend

The destruction of the Minoan civilization eventually morphed in Greek mythology into the legend of the lost civilization of Atlantis. The Atlantis legend began circa 360 BC, when the philosopher Plato wrote about a utopian, advanced, and dramatically lost country that vanished beneath the waves, in his Timaeus and Critias dialogues. In popular culture today, Atlantis is presented as a peaceful and wise country, an idealized model of what humanity could be. That was not Plato’s Atlantis, though. He wrote about a rich, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful country that was corrupted by its power. It tried to conquer the world, and the good guys in Plato’s narrative were not the good people of Atlantis, but Athens and her allies, who fought back. If Plato’s Atlantis existed today, it would probably try to conquer and enslave us all.

12. Did Atlantis Ever Exist?

Plato’s Atlantis, eventually sunk by the gods as punishment for its people’s hubris and moral decline, was entirely fictional – a plot device to advance some philosophical points. Centuries later, many people began to believe that Atlantis was real, and tried to prove its existence. The legend’s revival in the modern era and its transformation into popular pseudoscience can be traced back to a nineteenth century American amateur historian and congressman, Ignatius Donnelly. He wrote an 1882 book, The Antedeluvian World, in which he added new “facts” that became part of the Atlantis myth. He also theorized that all major human advances originated in Plato’s sunken island. Is there any archaeological evidence, though, that Atlantis ever existed?

11. Speculation About a Lost Civilization’s Location

Serious scholars dismissed Ignatius Donnelly, but some writers took his version of Atlantis, and ran with it. Most prominent among them in the early twentieth century were a mystic named Madame Blavatsky, and a famous psychic named Edgar Cayce. Cayce imparted a Christian spin to the story, and gave psychic readings in which he claimed that many of his clients had led past lives in Atlantis. He also predicted that Plato’s island would be discovered in 1969. It was not, despite the ancient Greek philosopher’s specificity about the location of Atlantis. Plato wrote of an island bigger than Asia (what Greeks called Asia Minor back then) and Libya put together, situated in the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, just past the Straits of Gibraltar. It is hard to miss a landmass that big, even if swallowed by the waves.

10. The Unwelcome Truth About Atlantis

Advocates of a “real” Atlantis argue that Plato was mistaken, or that for his own reasons, he deliberately sought to mislead. Despite great advances in submarine, deep sea probe, oceanography, and ocean floor mapping technologies, no evidence, archaeological or otherwise, has emerged that Plato’s fable described a real place. Although the ocean deep is still full of mysteries, it is difficult, to say the least, to miss a submerged landmass bigger than Asia Minor and Libya. Nonetheless, the notion of a lost advanced civilization is so fascinating that it is highly unlikely that the legend of Atlantis will die off anytime soon.

9. The Cause of History’s Deadliest Natural Disasters

Sudden violent natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are usually what most grip the imaginations. Such dynamic events unleash immediate and massive amounts mayhem in a short amount of time. However, history’s deadliest disasters – and by a long shot at that – are a bit more prosaic. Historically, when Mother Nature has put her mind to inflicting the most suffering upon mankind, she has done so not with volcanoes or earthquakes, but with floods. Indeed, as seen below, history’s deadliest flood was almost five times as deadly as the deadliest earthquake, that of Shaanxi in 1556, and over fifty six times as deadly as the deadliest volcanic eruption, that of Tambora in 1815.

8. “The River of Sorrows“

The Yellow River in northern China has been the cradle of that country’s civilization. On numerous occasions, however, it has also been China’s curse: another name for the Yellow River is “The River of Sorrows“. The river, which got its name from the yellow loess silt it carries and that gives it a distinctive color, is lined with dikes to keep it from overflowing its banks. Those dikes have failed on numerous occasions, with disastrous consequences. From time to time throughout China’s history, sudden heavy rainfalls have caused the Yellow River’s water level to rapidly rise. Sometimes that causes the river to top and overflowing the protective dikes, or breach them outright. In 1887, as seen below, one such episode led to the Yellow River’s deadliest flooding, and history’s second deadliest natural disaster.

7. Much of China’s History Has Revolved Around Flood Control

An enormous quantity of silt – about 1.5 billion tons each year – is carried by the Yellow River. Throughout most of China’s history, the river was not dredged. The result was a steady accumulation of silt at the bottom, causing the river bed to steadily rise. A rising river bed is bad for those who live and farm along its banks. The shallower the river gets, the wider it becomes, and that carries the threat of flood to adjacent lands. Much of China’s history has been about preventing that from happening, usually with massively labor intensive projects to line the Yellow River with protective dikes. As the river rose over the years, so did the dikes. This went on for thousands of years, until China ended up with a river that flows along at an elevated level, often higher than the adjacent land. So when dikes failed, the results were catastrophic.

6. The Sudden Onset of the 1887 Yellow River Flood

Unlike the case with most rivers, floodwaters don’t gradually rise when it comes to the Yellow River. Instead, Yellow Riverfloodwaters come crashing down from on high, sweeping all in their path with great violence. September, 1887 was a particularly wet time in northern China and along the Yellow River Valley. Towards the end of the month, days of heavy rains caused the river to swiftly swell. On September 28^th, the rapidly rising waters overcame and broke through the dikes near the city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province – a flat plain near the river’s mouth. Many people ran upstream in an attempt to reach a level above that of the rapidly flooding area, but were caught in the fast moving torrent and drowned.

5. From Fertile Agricultural Land to Desert

Just an hour after the Yellow River broke through its dikes, a lake as big as Lake Ontario had formed. People from drier areas tried to save as many as they could by rowing around in small boats. Some survivors reached and clung to terraces slightly higher than the water level, and waited for rescue. Others desperately clung to anything that could float. One family, aware that it had no chance of survival, placed a baby on top of a wooden chest, along with some food and a note bearing its name. The baby was saved. The family was never found. When the waters finally receded, survivors were left with a floodplain heaped with loess mud up to eight feet deep. As it dried out, the region looked more like the Sahara Desert, rather than the green and fertile agricultural plain it had been just a few days earlier.

4. A Truly Epic Flood

China in 1887 was ruled by a hapless and wholly inept imperial government on its last legs. It lacked both the organizational skills and the resources for the massive rescue, recovery, and rebuilding effort required to deal with the disaster. Nonetheless, Chinese farmers were familiar with the routines of dike repair. They came together by the hundreds of thousands, used whatever tools they could lay their hands on, and their bare hands when tools were unavailable, to repair the dikes before the next rainy season. It was not until early 1889 that the dikes were finally closed. By then, between drowning, diseases, and famine, the Yellow River flood had killed over 900,000 people.

3. History’s Deadliest Natural Disaster

The estimated 900,000 deaths of the 1887 Yellow River Flood made for an exceptionally horrific disaster, but that toll qualified it as “only” history’s second deadliest natural disaster. That flood’s fatalities were eclipsed by yet another Chinese riverine calamity: the 1931 China Floods. That year, the Yangtze and Huai rivers experienced disastrous flooding that covered about 70,000 square miles – an area as big as England, plus half of Scotland tossed in. 53 million people were impacted, and up to 4 million perished. It was caused by a perfect storm of extreme weather phenomenon, that all came together at the worst possible time.

2. Numerous Factors Contributed to Catastrophe

The 1931 China Floods began with a severe drought that hit China from 1928 to 1930. It was followed by an exceptionally severe winter in 1930, which deposited unusually massive amounts of snow and ice in the mountainous areas upstream from the Yangtze and Huai rivers. All that snow and ice melted early in the spring of 1931, and flowed downstream into the two rivers. It reached the middle Yangtze River Valley when the region was already experiencing exceptionally heavy spring rains. Things were made worse still by an unusually high number of cyclones. On average, the region experiences two cyclones a year. In 1931, it was hit by nine cyclones. All of those factors combined to bring about a catastrophe.

1.     A Calamity that Claimed Millions

Between snow and ice melt, heavy rains, and a seemingly ceaseless sequence of cyclones, the Yangtze and Huai rivers experienced catastrophic flooding. Downstream, the waters rose nearly 6 feet above the Shanghai Bund – the waterfront area in the city’s center. Upstream, in the region of Wuhan, the water level rose an incredible 53 feet above the yearly average. Significant but relatively less disastrous flooding also occurred in the Yellow River basin and along the Grand Canal. Farmlands and housing along the rivers were devastated. 15% of the rice and wheat crops were destroyed, in a country that had little margin to spare. 53 million people were impacted. The toll in lives was horrific. About 150,000 people were directly drowned, while millions more perished from starvation and in the subsequent diseases and epidemics. All in all, up to 4 million people perished, making the 1931 China Floods history’s deadliest natural disaster.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Adams, Mark – Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (2015)

Callendar, Gae – The Minoans and the Mycenaeans: Aegean Society in the Bronze Age (1999)

Dialogue Earth – Picturing Disaster: The 1931 Wuhan Flood

Down to Earth – The Yellow River Has Been Known as ‘China’s Sorrow’

Encyclopedia Britannica – Shaanxi Province Earthquake of 1556

Facts and Details – Yellow River

Federer, Kenneth L. – Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walum Olum (2010)

Flood List – Central China Flood, 1931

Friedrich, Walter L. – Fire in the Sea: The Santorini Volcano: Natural History and the Legend of Atlantis (1999)

History Collection – The Worst Avoidable Disasters in World History

Journal of Structural Geology, Volume 20, Issue 5, May 14^th, 1998 – Geomorphological Observations of Active Faults in the Epicentral Region of the Huaxian Large Earthquake in 1556 in Shaanxi Province, China

Live Science – ‘Lost City’ of Atlantis: Facts & Fable

National Geographic – Atlantis

Page, Sir Denys Lionel – The Santorini Volcano and the Destruction of Minoan Crete (1970)