Sometimes pulp fiction tells you so much more than academic papers can. As in the first pages of John Wyndham's classic Sci-Fi novel "The Day of the Triffids" from 1951. By ways of a lead by a friend in Brussels to an interview with British scholar Dorian Lynskey...
The city of Görlitz in the Lausatia region of Germany is famous for it's architectural heritage. The Holy Grave, also referred to as Görtlitz Jerusalem, is an artificial landscape with several buildings designed to reference Christian holy sites in Jerusalem in...
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...
Historic water mark in a staircase in the Bonner Münster marking the 1784 flood level. Cities in the Rhine region in west Germany have been subject to floodings for centuries. In 1784 a particularly severe flooding event occured during a particularly cold winter. Here...
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...
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...
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...
In Greek and Roman Antiquity extreme weather events and natural disasters like droughts, earthquakes and floods were a frequent occurrence. They also offered important stages for the display of political power. Political leaders would rush to the occasion to help the...
This silver coin was printed in 1737 to celebrate the end of the flood and famine in Silesia in 1736/1737. The front shows the biblical scene of the dove returning to Noah's Ark with a German text from Psalm 37, which translates as "Put your life in the hands of the...
This is the famous section from the 28. book of the "Res Gestae", the history written by Roman historian Ammianus who lived from around 330 - 400 CE. It describes the earthquake and tsunami of July 21. 365 CE which shook the whole Mediterranean. The scene described by...
