Articles about disasters & nature across every continent and era, oldest first.
A 2018 NASA workshop put the 1908 Tunguska blast at 10-20 megatons at 10 km. A 2025 paper traces its 80 million trees figure to an unsourced 1930s guess.
· 1908Lord Mersey's report of July 30, 1912, blamed excessive speed; Senator William Alden Smith's May 28 speech named Captain Smith's "overconfidence and neglect."
· 1912A French munitions ship and a Norwegian steamer collided in Halifax's Narrows on December 6, 1917; the official register closed with 1,631 dead.
· 1917The New Zealand steamer Talune carried influenza to Western Samoa in November 1918. American Samoa's quarantine held, and Western Samoa lost a fifth of its people.
· 1918A molasses tank in Boston's North End burst on January 15, 1919, killing 21. In 1925 auditor Hugh W. Ogden held its owner responsible, not anarchists.
· 1919An IAEA table printed in 1998 counts 456 Soviet nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from August 29, 1949; the site closed in August 1991, a date the UN kept.
· 1949Frank Kingdon-Ward was camped at Rima in Tibet when the August 15, 1950 earthquake struck. Catalogues give 8.6 to 8.8; no single death toll exists.
· 1950The surge of January 31–February 1, 1953 was later rated a 300-year level. The Delta Committee set a 10,000-year standard; Britain capped defenses at 1953.
· 1953A Chisso doctor reported an unknown nervous disease on May 1, 1956. Japan named methylmercury from the plant in 1968; a mercury treaty followed in 2013.
· 1956The world's fourth largest lake lost its rivers to Soviet cotton after 1960. NASA recorded the eastern basin gone in 2014; a 13 km dike saved the north.
· 1960A shallow shock under central Tashkent on April 26, 1966 left over 300,000 of 1.5 million people homeless. Official deaths were counted as eight or 10.
· 1966Tip No 7 fell on Aberfan on October 21, 1966. A Tribunal blamed the National Coal Board; £150,000 of disaster-fund money paid for tip removal until 1997.
· 1966Papers count Bhopal's immediate dead at 2,000, 2,500 or 3,800; the 1989 settlement of US$470 million rested on 3,000; 15,310 death claims paid by 2003.
· 1984At 01:23:04 on April 26, 1986, a turbine rundown test began at Chernobyl Unit 4; 45 seconds later a fuel channel ruptured. INSAG-7, Pripyat and the counts.
· 1986On August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released stored carbon dioxide, killing at least 1,700 people. A degassing pipe began pumping the lake in 2001.
· 1986On November 6, 1991, the Emir of Kuwait extinguished the last of the oil-well fires Iraqi forces had set, the Senate recorded, ending a nine-month effort.
· 1991An earthquake under northern Awaji Island at 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, was rated M7.2, then M7.3 in 2001. Japan's final count is 6,434 dead.
· 1995A NASA oral history records how a four-person team advised Chile on re-feeding, urine tests and the Fénix capsule during the 2010 San José mine rescue.
· 2010
