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List of All Topics
Disasters
After any type of disaster, people feel relieved to be alive. But then they often feel stress, fear and anger. Most people will also find that they can't stop thinking about what happened. These feelings and memories aren't a sign of personal weakness. Most trauma survivors have stress reactions for days or weeks. But some people have long-term problems, including
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Depression
- Self-blame
- Suicidal thoughts
- Alcohol or drug abuse
If you've survived a disaster, talk to your family and friends when you are ready. Most people recover from trauma naturally over time. If your emotional reactions are getting in the way of your relationships, work, or other important activities, you might want to talk to a counselor or your doctor. Treatments are available.
A disaster (from Middle French désastre, from Old Italian disastro, from the Greek pejorative prefix dis- bad + aster star) is the impact of a natural or man-made hazards that negatively affects society or environment. The word disaster's root is from astrology: this implies that when the stars are in a bad position a bad event will happen. Disasters occur when hazards strike in vulnerable areas. Hazards that occur in areas with low vulnerability do not result in a disaster; as is the case in uninhabited regions. It is often argued that all disasters are human-made, because human actions before the strike of the hazard can prevent it developing into a disaster. Hazards are routinely divided into natural or human-made, although complex disasters, where there is no single root cause, are more common in developing countries. A specific disaster may spawn a secondary disaster that increases the impact. A classic example is an earthquake that causes a tsunami, resulting in coastal flooding.
Natural Disasters
A natural disaster is the consequence of when a potential natural hazard becomes a physical event (e.g. volcanic eruption, earthquake, landslide) and this interacts with human activities. Human vulnerability, caused by the lack of planning, lack of appropriate emergency management or the event being unexpected, leads to financial, structural, and human losses. The resulting loss depends on the capacity of the population to support or resist the disaster, their resilience. This understanding is concentrated in the formulation: "disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability". A natural hazard will hence never result in a natural disaster in areas without vulnerability, e.g. strong earthquakes in uninhabited areas. The term natural has consequently been disputed because the events simply are not hazards or disasters without human involvement. The degree of potential loss can also depend on the nature of the hazard itself, ranging from a single lightning strike, which threatens a very small area, to impact events, which have the potential to end civilization.
Man-made hazards
Disasters having an element of human intent, negligence, error or the ones involving the failure of a system are called man-made disasters. Man-made hazards are in turn categorised as technological or sociological. Technological hazards are results of failure of technology, such as engineering failures, transport accidents or environmental disasters. Sociological hazards have a strong human motive, such as crime, stampedes, riots and war.
Hypothetical disaster
A hypothetical disaster is any sort of major world disaster, human-wrought or natural, for which there is no known historical or geological evidence but scientists have speculated to be possible.
List of Hypothetical Disasters
Mega Earthquake
A Mega Earthquake is an earthquake exceeding magnitude 9 on the richter scale. Earthquakes of up to magnitude 9.5 (for example the Great Chilean Earthquake) have been recorded.
Megatsunami
Very large tsunamis can be triggered by meteorite impacts or landslides into a sea. Geological evidence shows megatsunamis have happened in the past. One candidate landslide site is in the Canary Islands, with potential to send a catastrophic tsunami to the East Coast of the USA.
Large meteorite impacts
The effects of large meteorite impacts can have global effects — tsunamis, fires, and nuclear winter. Meteorites are believed to have killed significant numbers of species in the past, famously the mass extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
Super Hurricane
A Super Hurricane (or Typhoon or Cyclone) is a very powerful tropical cyclone with winds that can be at or over 200 mph and sometimes can be over 1,000 miles wide in diameter. Such storms have been theorized since the 1800s, but have never been observed. Since the 1960s numerous storms in the Pacific were said to have winds above 200 mph but they are difficult to verify due to the technology at the time.
Severe Pandemic
A severe Pandemic is a serious outbreak of a potentially fatal disease. Pandemics have occurred in the past; e.g. Black Death in the 1400s and the Spanish Flu of 1918. Many scientists believe that there will be another great Pandemic or Epidemic in the near future, quite possibly an outbreak of avian influenza.
Supervolcano
A very large volcanic eruption can cause a nuclear winter effect on a global scale. The Yellowstone Caldera is a famous repeating supervolcano.
Astrophysical events
It has been theorized that at least in one occasion mass extinctions, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction events, were caused by a hypernova. The explosion of a nearby hypergiant star (100-200 times bigger than our own Sun) can generate a gamma-ray burst with potential to destroy the majority of life on Earth.
Another apocalyptic event would be a black hole entering the solar system, though the chances are remote. The gravitical changes it would cause would be utterly disastrous for the Earth's climate.
Other cataclysmic stellar events may have similar effects, such as the merger of two neutron stars. The processes that produce high energy gamma-ray bursts are unknown.Mega Heatwave or Greenhouse Effect
A Mega Heatwave is an extreme kind of heatwave that affects a large area. This disaster can last for months or years compared to normal heatwave and can happen in a sudden or steady rate (The Greenhouse Effect for example). The effect of a mega heatwave is severe drought, famine, melting of the polar ice caps and loss of plant and animal life. Global warming is believed to be slowly melting the polar ice caps. Sea levels around the world would rise by several meters, permanently flooding large areas of land. Global warming can also affect ecosystems, killing species and causing drought and famine. This disaster is not likely to occur suddenly, but over decades or centuries.
Widespread Economic Collapse
An Economic Collapse is a sudden and simultaneous downfall of an economy worldwide. Economic collapses has happened in the past (e.g. Wall Street Crash of 1929) but not on a global scale. It can have widespread results like the Great Depression of the 1930s. A possible scenario is that one country experiences an economic crisis which causes a chain reaction until the whole world experiences the direct and after effect. This can happen in days, weeks or months.
Sudden mass migration
As an effect of another disaster, large numbers of people from one country can flee to neighbouring countries. This sudden migration can cause a widespread humanitarian problems, or trigger civil unrest. One disaster can thus trigger an even more serious one.
Fate of the Sun
The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, in 4-5 billion years, it will enter a red giant phase, its outer layers expanding as the hydrogen fuel in the core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up. Helium fusion will begin when the core temperature reaches up to 100 MK, and will produce carbon and oxygen. While it is likely that the expansion of the outer layers of the Sun will reach the current position of Earth's orbit, recent research suggests that mass lost from the Sun earlier in its red giant phase will cause the Earth's orbit to move further out, preventing it from being engulfed. However, Earth's water and most of the atmosphere will be boiled away.