Environment & climate

Around 74,000 years ago the Toba volcano in Sumatra produced one of the largest eruptions of the Quaternary, ejecting roughly 2,800 cubic kilometres of material and blanketing South Asia in a layer of ash still traceable today.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the most recent interval of maximum global ice cover, when continental ice sheets over North America (Laurentide), northern Europe and Scandinavia reached their greatest extent, roughly between 26,500 and…

During the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels stood roughly 120 metres below present, exposing the floor of what is now the southern North Sea as a vast lowland known to archaeologists as Doggerland.

Toward the end of the Pleistocene, a wave of extinctions eliminated much of the world's megafauna — animals over about 44 kg — with especially severe losses in the Americas and Australia.

Just as the planet was warming out of the last ice age, the Younger Dryas was an abrupt return to near-glacial conditions across the Northern Hemisphere, lasting from roughly 12,900 to 11,700 years ago.

The end of the Younger Dryas marks one of the most consequential thresholds in human history: the close of the Pleistocene 'Ice Age' epoch and the beginning of the Holocene, the warm, comparatively stable interglacial in which all later…

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), an iconic emblem of Ice Age megafauna, vanished from most of its vast Eurasian and North American range as the Pleistocene ended.

The 8.2-kiloyear event was the most pronounced abrupt climate fluctuation of the early Holocene, a sudden cooling that began around 8,200 years before present (c. 6200 BCE) and lasted roughly 150 years.

Driven by gradual changes in Earth's orbital geometry that weakened the West African and North African monsoons, the 'Green Sahara' of the early-to-mid Holocene gave way to the modern desert.

Around 2200 BCE a severe, century-long aridification known as the 4.2-kiloyear event spread across the Mediterranean, West Asia, North Africa and South Asia, ranking among the most abrupt climate shocks of the Holocene.

From around 1900 BCE the Mature Harappan urban order unravelled in a gradual process of de-urbanisation rather than sudden catastrophe.

The volcano on the Aegean island of Thera (modern Santorini) erupted in one of the largest volcanic events of the Holocene, ejecting tens of cubic kilometres of material and burying the prosperous Minoan town of Akrotiri under ash and…

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE buried the Campanian towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under metres of ash, pumice and pyroclastic surges, killing thousands and freezing daily Roman life in place.

In early 536 CE a massive volcanic eruption—most likely in Iceland, though North American sources have also been proposed—injected vast quantities of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, creating a dense dust veil that dimmed the sun…

The Eldgjá eruption, which began in the spring of 939 CE and continued at least episodically until the autumn of 940 CE, was the largest effusive (lava-producing) volcanic eruption on Earth in the last few millennia.

The Medieval Warm Period, also called the Medieval Climate Anomaly or Medieval Climate Optimum, was an interval of relatively warm climate lasting from roughly 950 to 1250 CE, most pronounced in the North Atlantic region and parts of…

In 1257 CE, the Samalas volcano within the Mount Rinjani volcanic complex on the island of Lombok, Indonesia, produced one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the Holocene, rated VEI 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

Beginning in the spring of 1315, relentless rains and unusually cold weather ruined harvests across northern Europe from Ireland and England through France, the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia and Poland.

Around 1452 CE a colossal volcanic eruption in the Shepherd Islands of present-day Vanuatu destroyed the island of Kuwae, splitting it and leaving a submarine caldera roughly 6 by 12 km across between the modern islands of Epi and Tongoa.

On 23 January 1556, a catastrophic earthquake of an estimated magnitude around 8.0 struck Huaxian (modern Huazhou) in the Wei River Valley of Shaanxi province during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming dynasty, earning it the name…

During the seventeenth century the Northern Hemisphere experienced the deepest cold of the Little Ice Age, with falling temperatures, shortened growing seasons and erratic weather driven partly by reduced solar activity and volcanic…

Within a few centuries of Polynesian settlement around 1200 CE, the subtropical forest that once covered Rapa Nui (Easter Island) - dominated by a now-extinct giant palm (Paschalococos disperta, related to the Chilean wine palm Jubaea)…

On 19 February 1600, the Huaynaputina volcano in the Moquegua region of southern Peru erupted explosively, producing the largest volcanic eruption recorded in South American history and one of the most powerful worldwide in the past two…

On the morning of Saturday, 1 November 1755, the Feast of All Saints, a massive earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.7 or greater struck off the coast of Portugal, with its epicentre in the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Cape St. Vincent.

The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 was a catastrophic famine that devastated Bengal, Bihar, and parts of Orissa under the administration of the British East India Company.

Beginning on 8 June 1783, the Laki (Lakagígar) fissure system in southern Iceland, linked to the Grímsvötn volcano, erupted continuously for roughly eight months, disgorging some 14 cubic kilometres of basaltic lava along with vast clouds…

The Doji bara, or Skull, famine devastated the Indian subcontinent between roughly 1789 and 1792, triggered by one of the most severe El Nino events in recorded history, which scholars date to 1789-1793 (with associated climatic disruption…

On 10 April 1815 Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) erupted in the most powerful volcanic event in recorded history, a VEI-7 explosion that ejected roughly 40 cubic kilometres of material and…

On 1 March 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone National Park in the territories of Wyoming and Montana, creating the first federally protected national park in the world.

The 1931 Central China floods, also called the 1931 Yangtze–Huai River floods, were a series of catastrophic inundations across central and eastern China that are widely regarded as the deadliest natural disaster in recorded history.

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms and ecological catastrophe that devastated the agriculture and ecology of the American and Canadian Great Plains during the 1930s.

Built across the Nile between 1960 and 1970, Egypt's Aswan High Dam ended millennia of annual flooding, brought hydroelectric power nationwide, and became a monument to postcolonial development and Cold War rivalry.

Published on 27 September 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring documented the ecological damage caused by the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, including harm to bird populations, wildlife and human health.

Beginning in 1968, a prolonged failure of the monsoon rains across the Sahel—the semi-arid belt south of the Sahara—triggered one of the twentieth century's worst environmental and humanitarian disasters, peaking with widespread famine…

The first Earth Day was held on 22 April 1970, conceived by US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and coordinated nationally with organiser Denis Hayes.

The deadliest tropical cyclone on record struck the low-lying Ganges Delta of East Pakistan on 12 November 1970, when the Bhola cyclone drove a storm surge across densely populated islands and killed at least 300,000 people, possibly as…

A catastrophic drought gripped Africa's Sahel in the early 1970s, culminating in famine that killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of people and devastated six countries—Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad.

On the night of 2-3 December 1984, approximately 45 tons of the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, after water entered storage tank E610…

The world's worst nuclear power accident occurred on 26 April 1986 when reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded during a botched safety test, blasting open the core and hurling radioactive material high into…

The Montreal Protocol is a landmark international environmental treaty adopted on 16 September 1987 in Montreal, Canada, to phase out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and…

One of the worst floods in Bangladesh's recorded history inundated roughly 60 percent of the country in 1988, after weeks of exceptional monsoon rains swelled the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers so that their peaks coincided across…

From 3 to 14 June 1992 the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), popularly the 'Earth Summit', convened in Rio de Janeiro, drawing delegations from 178 countries and over 100 heads of state in the largest…

On 26 December 2004 a magnitude 9.1-9.3 megathrust earthquake ruptured the seafloor off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, where the India Plate subducts beneath the Burma Plate.

During 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the most authoritative synthesis of climate science to date.

Between June and October 2022 catastrophic monsoon flooding, intensified by record heat and accelerated glacial melt, submerged roughly a third of Pakistan.

Climate agencies including the EU's Copernicus service confirmed 2024 as the warmest year in the instrumental record and the first full calendar year more than 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial baseline — the threshold central to the Paris…

On 28 March 2025, a magnitude-7.7 earthquake struck central Myanmar near the city of Mandalay along the Sagaing Fault, killing thousands of people and becoming the country's most catastrophic seismic event since 1912.

On 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued a landmark advisory opinion declaring that states have binding legal obligations under international law to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and protect the climate…

On 31 August 2025, a magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan's Kunar province near the border with Pakistan, killing approximately 2,200 people and making it the deadliest quake to hit the country since 1998.

In 2025, renewable energy surpassed coal as the largest single source of electricity generation worldwide for the first time, a structural milestone in the global energy transition.