Nature has generously endowed humanity with everything it needs for its existence. Man skillfully or unskillfully adapted to its conditions, even sometimes to its whims, and it seems to us that we have studied our planet up and down. And having studied, they mastered its natural resources, conquered the depths of the ocean and began to conquer space. On the surface of the earth, man has laid roads and railways, and our blue planet patiently demolishes all this. But wasn't the man proud of his successes, condescendingly calling her "the old Earth"? The forces of nature are not yet fully subject to humanity, the restless Earth is stronger than us. There are such tragic situations and circumstances when a person is completely powerless to do anything to save himself.
"The earth, on the surface of which we live, is itself a living organism, possessing a circulatory system, respiratory tract and nervous system, and it feeds on the cosmic ether." This is how Professor Challenger, the author of the experiment described by Conan Doyle in the story "When the Earth Screamed", reasoned. To confirm his assumption, the professor ventured to inject the planet with the help of modern equipment for those times. When a sharp drill plunged into the deep mass, exposed under the stone shell, there was a terrible cry, which reached from England to France. A fountain of sticky dark mass - the blood of the planet - burst out of the punctured shaft. The wound was soon healed, but for a long time the Earth could not calm down.
Angry Nature periodically warns mankind, unleashing floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons on it, which claim many human lives.
When we use the word "catastrophe", we usually imagine a sudden, unexpected occurrence that has long-term and destructive consequences, although it may itself be fleeting.
In the past, the number of natural disasters was probably the same as today. But now their consequences are much more significant. According to S. I. Ozhegova, "a disaster is an event with unfortunate, tragic consequences." Behind such a brief description of the phenomenon are human fates, but it is customary to judge the magnitude of the disaster by the number of victims and the amount of damage caused, rather than by the size of the area affected by it. The strongest earthquakes that have occurred in a vast but uninhabited area are often not considered significant disasters. So, for example, one of the largest landslides happened a million years ago on the territory of present-day Iran. But since we are not talking about human sacrifice, then they do not speak about it as a great tragedy.
In our book, we want to somewhat correct this idea, and therefore included chapters on meteorites, aliens, fires and some others. The authors-compilers in the first section of the book tried to select the most typical cases when a person inevitably becomes a victim of natural disasters.
There is no exact data about ancient catastrophes, but the first - a reliably known natural disaster that befell people - happened about one million years ago. It happened in a dry bed of one of the rivers in Ethiopia. The flash flood took a group of human ancestors by surprise, maybe a whole family. In 1975, their remains were found under black sediments. This catastrophe was followed by thousands of others, about a hundred of which (the most significant, in the opinion of the compilers), we decided to tell in this book.
It is divided into two large sections - "Natural disasters" and "Man-made disasters". In the first of them, the compilers tried to present the most characteristic natural disasters known in historical times. Of course, not all of them were included in this section, but the compilers tried to select those that are rarely found in other similar literature.
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The second section is made up of tragedies, which to a large extent occurred through the fault of a person - from his irrepressible pride or from the imperfection of his technical capabilities. The reader may think that few facts about sea shipwrecks are included here. Indeed, not enough … But the publishing house plans to prepare a separate book on this topic - "One Hundred Great Shipwrecks", which will also be presented to its regular readers for judgment.
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev