20. Century

San Francisco (1936)

The movie "San Francisco" is considered the first real Disaster Movie out of Hollywood. The film premiered in 1936, exactly 30 years after the San Francisco earthquake, one of the most severe and best known natural disasters of the 20. Century. Surprisingly, for 90...

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Miller’s Apocalypse and Climate Doom

Today stories and movies about the apocalypse are ubiqius. Fueled by climate anxiety and a general sense of uncertainty and instability, the genre is in high demand. But this has not always been the case! Only very recently, in the second half of the 19. century...

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White Man’s Hole

Considering that surface temperatures in many places across the globe will rise significantly in average due to global warming, this little town in Australia's outback might become something of an enigma for our future cities. Coober Pedy is a mining village...

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The Great Smog

Extreme Weather and politics in Britain in 1952 as seen in the series The Crown. This is from Season 1, episode 4, released in 2016.

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The Melt Down (1977)

The Man from Atlantis was a TV series that cashed in on the popularity of underwater films in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though the series didn't run for long, it was impressive enough to birth multiple adaptations as comic books and novels. From today's perspective...

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The Last Wave (1977)

This is a 1977 Australian movie about a series of freak storms in Sidney. It was Peter Weir’s second major film after the success of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” two years earlier. Both films depict the arrival of supernatural or unexplainable occurrences in otherwise...

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Bhola Cyclone of 1970

The 1970 Bhola cyclone (also known as the Great Cyclone of 1970) was a devastating tropical cyclone that struck East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) and India's West Bengal on November 12, 1970. It remains the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded and one of the...

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The Bride and the Sink Hole

The city of Alexandria once had an extensive network of water cisterns below ground that distributed drinking water from a channel connecting the river Nile south-east of the city with the city’s harbor in the west. This was vital for the survival of the population as...

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Storm surge events on the North Sea

12/26/838First documented storm surge in the North Sea; Approximately 2,500 deaths in what is now the Netherlands. 2/17/1164First Julian flood: 20,000 dead; First collapse of the Jade Bay, major damage in the Elbe area. 1/16/1219First Marcellus flood: 36,000 dead:...

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A living thing – the Barrier Islands of North Carolina

The only constant is change, that's the creed of the Barrier Islands of North Carolina according to marine scientist Orin Pilkey. In his introduction to this PBS documentary from the 1980s, Pilkey provocatively comments the image of beach houses slowly being swallowed...

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