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...
What we know about disasters, we know from the media. The medium forms the message, so media forms the disaster, what we think it is and - maybe - what it is like to be in it. While for millenia natural disasters remained engimatic for the very practical reason that...
The winter of 1783/1784 was extremely cold in central Europe. When the unusually large amount of snow and ice melted in the spring, many German cities witnessed severe floods. These flood events are now considered one of the most severe natural disasters in...
Eventually I will have to stop collecting comics about Venice - there are simply too many. It's no wonder comic artists are attracted to Venice. As Kia Vahland has recently written in a German newspaper article: "The principle of resilience through beauty has a long...
Sculpture of fish god from Lepenski Vir, likely to have been part of the people’s spiritual responses to flooding. Credit: Mickey Mystique/Wikimedia Commons In a beautiful article from 2019, Patrick Nunn gives a couple of examples for protection architecture that...
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...
According to historian Terje Tvedt the Greek god and hero Heracles derived from a much older Egyptian hero of similar name. The now submerged city Heracleion off the coast of the Nile delta was named after the god and Heracles plays a central role in the ancient...
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:...