Top 10 Terrifying Natural Disasters in History

NNatural disasters cause fascination in everyone – as is apparent from the enormous amounts of press coverage that they give – Haiti being a good example of this. We all fear the day that we might be caught in one, and perhaps that is the reason for our fascination. This list looks at ten of the most terrifying natural disasters ever.

Number 10 - Typhoon Tip

Pacific typhoons are generally more powerful than Atlantic hurricanes, because the former have much more water over which they can gather strength.

On October 12, 1979, Tip made history with the lowest air pressure ever recorded at sea level on Earth: 870 mbars. Tip had one 1 minute sustained winds of 190 mph. Standard sea level air pressure is 1,013.25 mbars. Hurricane Andrew only made it to 922 mbars. 

Number 9 - The Lake Nyos Limnic Eruption

Limnic eruptions are one of the most bizarre natural disasters known. The criteria required for one to occur make them very rare. Lake Nyos is in a very remote area of the Cameroonian jungle. It is not very large, only 1.2 miles by 0.75 miles, but it is quite deep, 682 feet.

On August 21, 1986, the carbon dioxide at the bottom of the lake suddenly erupted all at once, 1.6 million tons of it, and released a cloud of carbon dioxide from the lake.

Number 8 - The 1960 Chile Earthquake

The most powerful earthquake ever recorded struck near Valdivia, Chile on May 22, 1960, at 2:11 PM local time. As many as 6,000 people were killed.

The quake measured 9.5 in magnitude, and 35 foot high waves were recorded 6,000 miles away. The quake possessed 178 billion tons of TNT. This would have powered the entire United States, at 2005 energy consumption levels, for 740 years.

Number 7 - The 2003 European Heat Wav

There were at least 14,802 deaths from the heat in France alone, most of them old people in nursing homes, or in single family homes without the ability to cool off. The heat dried up most of Europe, and severe forest fires broke out in Portugal. Some 2,000 people died there from the heat.

About 300 died in Germany, where the weather is usually very cold to delightfully mild; 141 in Spain, where the temperature actually gets into the 90s Fahrenheit once in a great while; 1,500 in the Netherlands.

Number 6 - The Storm of the Century

From March 12 to 13, 1993, a cyclonic storm formed off the east coats of the United States, so vast in size that it caused a unique hodgepodge of severe weather.

Rarely does a single storm system cause blizzards from the Canada/U. S. border all the way down to Birmingham, Alabama, but this one did, and Birmingham received 12 to 16 inches of snowfall in one day and night. This was accompanied everywhere with hurricane-force wind gusts of 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Number 5 - The Great Flood of 1931

The deadliest natural disaster ever recorded occurred through the winter, spring, and summer of 1931 in central China. The winter snowstorms were particularly heavy in the mountains around the river basins, and when spring began, all this snow melted and flowed into the rivers.

Then the spring brought particularly heavy rains. Then the cyclone season, which usually brings only 2 storms per year, brought 10, 7 of them in July.

Number 4 - The Tunguska Explosion

On June 30, 1908, at about 7:14 AM local time, an asteroid or comet plummeted over the lower Tunguska River, in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, a remote area of Siberia, and detonated at an altitude of 3 to 6 miles.

It exploded with the energy of the largest thermonuclear bomb the United States has ever tested, the Castle Bravo bomb, 10-15 megatons. The airburst toppled about 80 million trees over 772 square miles of Siberian taiga. 

Number 3 - The 1999 Bridge Creek F5 Tornado 

On May 3, 1999, a tornado outbreak lasting for 3 days, began with a bang. This tornado was the most powerful windstorm ever recorded on Earth, at 318 mph. It killed 36 people, and traveled northeast from Amber, OK, through Bridge Creek and Moore.

Number 2 - The 1815 Tambora Eruption

Mt. Tambora is on Sumbawa Island, in south Indonesia. It erupted from April 6 to 11, 1815, but the worst of this was at the end, from 10 to 11 April. The power is rated as 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making this eruption the most powerful in recorded history, four times more powerful than the 1883 Krakatoa eruption.

This means that the Tambora eruption was 52,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima Bomb. 92,000 people were killed, most by starvation, the largest loss of life caused by a volcanic eruption in recorded history.

The finer ash remained in the atmosphere for 3 years and covered the entire planet, causing brilliant sunsets, and the famous “Year without a Summer,” in both North America and Europe. The ash disrupted the weather, and caused global temperatures to decrease as much as 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit on average, an enormous drop. 

Number 1 - The 1958 Lituya Bay Megatsunami 

Megatsunamis were only theorized until July 9, 1958, when, in Lituya Bay, a very narrow fjord of the Alaskan panhandle, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake shook 90 million tons of rock and glacial ice off the mountainside at the head of the bay.

This generated the highest wave ever recorded on Earth, 1,720 feet. That’s 470 feet taller than the tip of the Empire State Building’s antenna. It is, in fact, taller than all but the five tallest skyscrapers on Earth today, and most scientists agree that it had sufficient power to rip these buildings from their foundations.