The Seven Years Europe Ate Its Own
The rain started in May 1315 and did not stop. Across northern Europe the harvest failed for three years running. By 1317 cities were locking up their own children.
Read the story →A theme
Disaster
Earthquakes, fires, floods, eruptions, and the human responses to them.
17 stories in this theme.
The Fire That Killed Two Thousand and Got Forgotten the Same Night
On the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, a wildfire two hundred and fifty kilometers north killed five times as many people. Almost nobody heard about it.
Read the story →The Fire That Was Not the Cow's Fault
The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →The Seventy Years the Sun Forgot to Have Spots
Between 1645 and 1715 the surface of the Sun was nearly blank. Sunspot counts dropped to almost zero. Europe froze. Astronomers noticed, then forgot.
Read the story →The Explosion Ten Days After the Towers
On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →The Plague Novel Mary Shelley Wrote in 1826
Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →The Warehouse That Sat Burning for Six Years
On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →The Centuries Europe Froze
From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
Read the story → The Coroner’s Report June 9, 2026 · Chicago River, between Clark and LaSalle Street bridges, Chicago
The Picnic Boat That Tipped Over at the Dock
On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.
Read the story →The Morning the Siberian Sky Caught Fire
On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
Read the story →Two Minutes, Two Survivors
On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.
Read the story →The Captain Who Stayed on the Burning Ship
On 16 April 1947 a French freighter loaded with fertilizer caught fire at a Texas dock. Everyone but Captain de Guillebon ran. He fought the fire.
Read the story →The Volcano Nobody Wrote About
Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →The Telegraph Operator Who Stayed at His Key
On 6 December 1917, Vince Coleman had ninety seconds to warn the incoming trains. He used them, and then he was gone.
Read the story →The Loudest Sound Ever Heard
On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →The Summer That Wasn’t, and the Monster It Made
In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →The Smell That Built a City
London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
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