- 4 minutes ago
From explosive volcanoes to deadly quakes and record-breaking storms, these natural disasters didn’t just devastate one region—they sent shockwaves around the planet. Join us as we look at catastrophes whose effects were felt far beyond the places where they struck, reshaping history, science, and disaster preparedness for generations.
Transcript
00:00The tsunami on the 26th of December 2004 is one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded
00:06history. Welcome to WatchMojo and today we're looking at devastating natural disasters with
00:11global consequences. The eruption triggered global climate change. Rain and cold caused
00:18dramatic crop failures in the northern hemisphere. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption. The world had never
00:25experienced anything quite like Krakatoa. On August 27th, 1883, the volcano's climactic
00:33explosion tore two-thirds of the Indonesian island apart. The climax came on August the
00:3927th, 1883, with an explosion equal to 3,000 atom bombs. Half the island of Krakatoa disappeared
00:47with a bang that was heard as far away as Sri Lanka and Australia. It produced what remains
00:53the loudest sound ever recorded. Audible over 4,800 kilometers away, near Mauritius, the collapse
01:00triggered tsunamis reaching 30 meters that killed more than 36,000 people, with waves detected on
01:06tide gauges as far as the English Channel. Sulfur aerosols injected into the stratosphere cooled
01:19global temperatures by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius for years and painted sunsets blood-red worldwide.
01:26Some historians link that effect to the sky in Edvard Munch's The Scream. Telegraph cables carried the news
01:33within hours, making Krakatoa arguably the first disaster the world's learned about in real time.
01:39Half the island of Krakatoa had disappeared, much of it into the upper atmosphere.
01:44The 1991 Bangladesh Cyclone. On April 29th, 1991, darkness descended over the coastline of Bangladesh.
01:53It's a disaster of epic proportions. A super-cyclonic storm slammed into the Chittakong district with
01:59winds near 250 kilometers per hour, and a storm surge over six meters high. At least 138,000 people died,
02:07many on low-lying islands with no shelter to reach in time. While millions were left homeless,
02:13the scale of loss forced a reckoning.
02:16Millions are homeless, and disease is spreading. The crops, which are only two weeks away from an
02:21ample harvest, have been washed away by the sea. Bangladesh built a national network of cyclone
02:26shelters, trained community volunteers, and established one of the world's most effective
02:30early warning systems. The payoff came fast. When a comparably powerful cyclone struck again in 1997,
02:37the death toll fell to roughly 1,000. That gap remains the clearest evidence anywhere that their
02:43disaster preparedness saved countless lives. You learn from your mistakes, you learn from the
02:50devastation. It took 50 years, we say it took us 50 years to achieve this resilience.
02:57The 2010 Haiti earthquake. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake ruptured near Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010.
03:06A magnitude 7.0 is a very major quake, and this one was shallow and, of course, as you've noted,
03:14near a very large population center. So we have, unfortunately, the feeling that this is going
03:20to be a very devastating event. The violent trembling left Haiti's capital with collapsed homes,
03:25hospitals, and the presidential palace within seconds. The exact death toll has never been
03:30settled. Haiti's government cited figures as high as 316,000, while independent surveys and satellite
03:37damage assessments put the number closer to 100 to 160,000. There was a lot of hope in the aftermath
03:45of
03:46the earthquake that there would be some kind of major rebuilding, some kind of major reconstruction,
03:53both political and economic, as well as infrastructure, and that just simply didn't happen.
03:59The gap alone later became its own controversy in disaster science. What's undisputed is the scale of
04:05the response. Over three million people were affected, triggering one of history's largest
04:11humanitarian mobilizations. A cholera outbreak, reportedly introduced by UN peacekeepers,
04:17later killed thousands more. On top of everything else, a cholera outbreak swept the country months
04:22after the earthquake, brought in by United Nations peacekeepers. This compounded a crisis that exposed
04:28how poverty and weak infrastructure can magnify the impact of natural events. The 1976 Tangshan
04:35earthquake. Before sunrise on July 28, 1976, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake tore through Tangshan, China,
04:44while nearly a million residents slept. The earthquake was one of the deadliest
04:48of the 20th century. It destroyed the industrial city in North China's Hebei province,
04:54some 150 kilometers to the southwest of Beijing. Approximately 90 percent of the city's buildings
05:00collapsed almost instantly, trapping thousands beneath the ruins. China's official death toll of 242,000
05:07became one of the most disputed figures in modern disaster history. Most people were asleep and had
05:13no chance to escape. The force of the earthquake was equal to that of 400 Hiroshima atomic bombs,
05:20and most houses and buildings collapsed. Internal documents and independent historians
05:25suggested the real number was as high as 655,000. This was reportedly obscured for years because of the
05:32cultural revolution era secrecy and a refusal of foreign aid. Another aftershock struck that same
05:39evening, hampering rescue efforts already slowed by darkness and rubble. Tangshan was eventually
05:44rebuilt under China's first modern seismic building codes, becoming a turning point in the country's
05:50approach to disaster management. The reborn city has not only increased the standard of earthquake
05:55prevention in all buildings, but has also become a major industrial base and an international harbor
06:02in North China. The 1556 Shanxi earthquake Long before earthquakes as we know them today,
06:09one disaster left a mark that still defines seismic devastation. On January 23, 1556, an earthquake
06:17estimated at magnitude 8 struck China's Shanxi province and killed an estimated 830,000 people.
06:23Much of the toll came from the region's yaodeng design. Homes were carved into cliffs of soft lois soil,
06:30which were prone to instant collapse under seismic shaking, causing entire families to be buried.
06:35The quake devastated 97 counties across several provinces, some losing 60% of their population.
06:42There were no instruments to measure it. Even the magnitude was reconstructed entirely from
06:47damage patterns recorded in Ming Dynasty court documents. Nearly five centuries later,
06:53it remains the single deadliest natural calamity in recorded history. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and
07:00tsunami. In the afternoon of March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake ruptured off of Japan's
07:07Tohoku coast. It was the most powerful ever recorded in the country's history.
07:11Whole towns were washed off the map, leaving nothing behind. Over 100,000 people were evacuated.
07:19The quake shifted Honshu, Japan's main island, eastward by 2.4 meters, and knocked Earth's axis
07:26askew by up to 25 centimeters. The resulting tsunami reached nearly 40 meters in places, overwhelming sea
07:34walls built for waves half that size, and killed close to 20,000 people. Entire communities disappeared
07:40beneath the violent tides. The tsunami flooded the nuclear power plant. Results? Massive overheating,
07:47and reactors one, two, and three suffered meltdowns. It also flooded the Fukushima Daiichi plant,
07:53triggering meltdowns in three reactors and the largest nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. Despite
07:58Japan's reputation as arguably the world's best prepared country for earthquakes, the disaster came
08:04with extreme energy way beyond the country's expectations. The 2011 disaster left Fukushima
08:10changed forever. The biggest difference between what happened in Chernobyl and what happened in Fukushima
08:16is that the Japanese government believed the area has to be cleared. The 1970 Bola Cyclone,
08:22the night of November 12, 1970, brought one of the most disastrous storms in human history.
08:28The tropical depression has moved across Malaysia and has reached tropical storm strength in the Bay of
08:32Ganges. It rapidly intensifies and makes landfall in the early hours of the morning on November 13th.
08:38In what was then East Pakistan, a cyclone made landfill on the Ganges delta, driving a storm surge over
08:44100 meters high across islands with nowhere higher to run. Between 300,000 and 500,000 people died,
08:51most by drowning, making it the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, a title it still holds.
09:02In Tazamuddin alone, over 45% of the population was killed in a single night. The Pakistani government's
09:09slow dismissive response ignited outrage that hardened into political revolt. Historians now
09:15count Bola among the direct catalysts of the Bangladesh liberation war less than a year later.
09:20The government response was so poor it fueled protests that helped trigger a civil war,
09:24which turned Bangladesh into an independent country. Just that tragedy forever reshaped the nation's borders.
09:30The 1815 Mount Tambora eruption. The Earth's atmosphere itself became part of the catastrophe
09:36when Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in April 1815. Indonesia experienced a massive volcanic eruption.
09:44The eruption of Tambora was one of the largest in the last thousand years. Tambora produced the most
09:50powerful volcanic eruption ever documented. A VEI-7 event that blew roughly off the mountain's summit.
09:57Pyroclastic flows killed around 11,000 people immediately. Then, disease and starvation across
10:03the region pushed the toll past 90,000. A new and deadly strain of cholera triggered by the freak weather
10:11conditions in the Indian subcontinent quickly spread around the world.
10:17It was an epidemic raging out of control. An entire kingdom on Sumbawa, with its own language and
10:24culture, was buried under volcanic debris, and only rediscovered by archaeologists in 2004.
10:30The sulfur Tambora threw into the stratosphere, produced the June snow across New England,
10:35and ruined harvests from Ireland to China in 1816. This proverbial year without summer has gone down
10:42in history. Bad weather, lots of thunderstorms, and very little sunshine led to a disastrously poor
10:52harvest. It was called the year without a summer, with its gloomy skies inspiring Mary Shelley's
10:58Frankenstein. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. On Boxing Day in 2004, an earthquake beneath the Indian
11:06Ocean unleashed a tragedy that crossed borders, languages, and continents. It started with an
11:12undersea earthquake, one of the biggest in recorded history. The magnitude 9.1 aftershock off Sumatra
11:19ruptured a 1,300-kilometer stretch of seafloor and unleashed tsunamis. Waves reaching 30 meters killed
11:26roughly 230,000 people, more than half in Indonesia's Aceh province. The destruction I witnessed in
11:33Indonesia was on an almost unimaginable scale. Even a train in Sri Lanka was swept off its tracks,
11:39in the deadliest single rail disaster in history. The Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning system at
11:45the time, and many victims had no idea what the receding tide meant until the wave arrived. That
11:51catastrophe led directly to the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system, launched within two years, now
11:57credited with saving thousands of lives since. Yet the survivors rebuilt and recovered, sometimes from
12:04communities of which only fragments remained, leaving here and there monuments to that dreadful day.
12:12And carrying the hard lessons learnt on what to do should they hear the sirens,
12:16part of a now greatly improved warning system, go off.
12:21Before we continue, be sure to check out WatchMojo's 24-hour livestream. All of your favorite videos in
12:27one place, 24-7. Always on, always live.
12:31Are you not entertained?
12:33The 1931 China floods. Between June and August 1931, the Yangtze, Yellow, and Hawaii rivers all overflowed at
12:42once, after a brutal winter of snow, followed by nine cyclones in a single month. It submerged an
12:48area roughly the size of England and Scotland combined, and as many as 52 million people were
12:54affected. The death toll remains one of history's most contested. A 1931 field survey counted around
13:00150,000 drowned in the first hundred days. But China's own government commission later cited nearly
13:06two million dead, with some Western estimates reaching 3.7 million. The flooding destroyed farmland,
13:13displaced communities, and refugees resorted to selling family members and eating tree bark to
13:19survive. The catastrophe pushed China to establish its first river conservancy commissions, still
13:24functioning today. Which of these natural disasters is the most terrifying? Let us know in the comments
13:30section.