Browse Disasters
19 results
El Chichon Eruption
1982
For centuries El Chichón sat in southern Mexico as a nameless volcanic mound, thinly watched and easy to ignore—until a spring night in 1982 turned a forgotten mountain into a killer plume that darkened villages, buried valleys, and briefly altered the atmosphere of the planet.
Eyjafjallajokull Eruption
2010
A glacier-capped volcano in rural Iceland did not merely erupt in 2010—it slipped a continent into grounded stillness, revealing how tightly modern life depends on the invisible arithmetic of ash and wind.
Galeras Eruption
1993
A volcano already known to be restless drew scientists onto its flank for one more look — and then, in a matter of seconds, turned a field trip into a reckoning over who gets to stand inside the danger zone.
Hunga Tonga Eruption
2022
A submarine volcano in the South Pacific tore itself open with the force of a giant impact, hurling ash to the stratosphere, shaking the atmosphere around the globe, and driving a tsunami across the Pacific in a disaster that began far below the sea.
Kelud Eruption
1919
Kelud had slept above Java for years, but beneath its crater lake the mountain was loading a weapon: when the volcano finally broke, water became the carrier of fire, and the villages below were overwhelmed by a sudden, lethal tide.
Krakatoa Eruption
1883
For months Krakatoa had been only a noisy island in a busy strait. Then, in August 1883, it broke apart so violently that its sound crossed oceans, its tsunamis erased coastlines, and its ash turned daylight into a bruise-colored dusk across the world.
Laki Eruption
1783-1784
For eight months in 1783, a fissure ripped open Iceland and breathed poison into the North Atlantic sky—killing animals, starving communities, and sending a haze across Europe that some historians believe helped unsettle a continent already primed for revolution.
Mount Agung Eruption
1963
On Bali, a sacred mountain that had long been watched as a divine sentinel began to open without warning, and a ritual people still honored became the foreground of a disaster history written in ash, pyroclastic fire, and delayed help.
Mount Lamington Eruption
1951
A mountain the local people knew by its shape but not by its nature suddenly tore itself open, and in minutes a landscape of gardens, villages, and mission stations became a field of ash, fire, and silence.
Mount Merapi Eruption
2010
Merapi had spent centuries teaching Java to live with fire; in 2010, the mountain showed how fragile even the best-practiced evacuation system could be when the old volcano became faster, hotter, and deadlier than expected.
Mount Pelee Eruption
1902
A tropical capital went about its morning in the shadow of a beautiful mountain—and within minutes, Mount Pelée turned Saint-Pierre into a furnace of ash, gas, and stone.
Mount St. Helens Eruption
1980
At Mount St. Helens, a mountain everyone watched for an eruption did something volcanology had not fully prepared for: it exploded sideways, outran the warning zone, and turned a safe-distance lesson into a national reckoning.
Mount Unzen Eruption
1991
For more than a century, Mount Unzen slept above the city of Shimabara—until scientists went uphill to measure its breath, and the mountain answered with fire.
Nevado del Ruiz Eruption
1985
A volcano that looked manageable, a warning system that looked credible, and a river of mud that arrived anyway — in the dark, Nevado del Ruiz turned a modest eruption into a disaster measured in families erased from the map.
Novarupta Eruption
1912
In the summer of 1912, a volcano on the Alaska Peninsula tore open for sixty hours and built the youngest of the Katmai lava domes—an eruption so vast that it ranked among the largest of the modern era, yet so remote that the wider world scarcely understood what had happened until long after the ash had settled.
Pinatubo Eruption
1991
For centuries Pinatubo was a quiet mountain in plain sight. Then scientists learned to read its warnings in time to move tens of thousands—and, in one of the great accidental experiments in climate, its ash and sulfur cooled the planet.
Pompeii Eruption
79 CE
Long before the ash fell, Pompeii and Herculaneum looked secure—prosperous Roman towns at the foot of a mountain that had already forgotten it was a volcano. Then, in a single day, the mountain remembered.
Santorini Eruption
c. 1600 BCE
Long before Atlantis became a legend, a volcano in the Aegean rewrote the map of a civilization and may have left only ash, silence, and memory behind.
Tambora Eruption
1815
A volcano on a remote island tore open the atmosphere itself, and the weather of Europe and North America answered months later with hunger, frost, and famine.