The Cataclysm Files
Floods, impacts, supervolcanoes, and the extinctions that erased whole worlds before ours. The same forces that reset civilization once are still live risks today, so this wing runs the line from deep-time catastrophe straight into the dangers still ahead of us.
The Things That Can Hurt Earth From Space That Are Not Rocks
Between AD 774 and AD 775 the radiocarbon in the air jumped in a single year, and a Japanese cedar recorded it. The hazards from space that are not rocks, ordered by evidence rather than drama, with the corrections it makes to our own research files disclosed on the claims they belong to.
The Near Misses: The Asteroids That Did Not Hit
Four asteroids passed inside or near the Moon's orbit in ten days of August 2026, and two were found only after they had gone. This page carries the close-approach record against NASA's own data, corrects our own research files in seven places, and sets the odds beside the denominator nobody can measure.
The Black Death: The Pandemic That Remade Europe
Ancient DNA closed the question of what killed them: Yersinia pestis. How it moved through Europe, and how many it took, are still open questions.
The Bronze Age Collapse: The Fifty Years the Old World Came Apart
Mycenae fell, Hattusa was abandoned, Ugarit was never reoccupied. The famous year, 1177 BCE, is a book title. The real window is about fifty years.
The Carrington Event: The Solar Storm That Set the Wires on Fire
In 1859 a solar storm pushed the aurora into the tropics and set telegraph paper burning. The event is solid. The modern price tag and the odds of a repeat are not.
The Maya Collapse: The Cities That Went Silent, and the People Who Did Not Vanish
Between 810 and 909 CE the southern lowland cities fell silent one after another. Drought is the best-evidenced single contributor and not the only one, and the Maya are still here.
The Messinian Salinity Crisis: A Kilometre of Salt, and an Argument About How Dry It Got
A kilometre of salt under the Mediterranean is drilled and imaged rock. How dry the basin got, and how fast the Atlantic refilled it, are models the field is still arguing over.
Snowball Earth: The Planet That Froze to the Equator
Glacial deposits on every continent, some laid down within about 10 degrees of the equator. That much is verified. How completely the ocean froze is not.
The Laschamp Excursion: When the Magnetic Poles Nearly Flipped
About 42,000 years ago the magnetic field collapsed to roughly 5 to 6 percent of normal and the pole wandered south before snapping back. The geophysics is solid. The claimed cascade into Neanderthal extinction and cave art is not.
Thera: The Eruption Two Sciences Cannot Agree On
Thera left a caldera 11 by 7.5 km, tsunamis across the eastern Mediterranean, and a Bronze Age town under as much as 60 m of ash. Two sciences date it about a century apart.
Tunguska: The Morning the Sky Exploded Over Siberia
In 1908 an object detonated above the Siberian taiga and left no crater at all. A stony asteroid airburst is the leading account, and the body's composition is still disputed.
The Yellowstone Supervolcano: The Clock Beneath the Park
Three eruptions in 2.1 million years carved the ground under a national park. The fourth is not on any clock, and the USGS ranks it the least likely thing Yellowstone will do.
The Permian Extinction: When Earth Almost Died
About 252 million years ago, Siberian volcanism drove the worst extinction in Earth's record. The famous 96 percent figure is an extrapolation, not a count, and a 2016 reassessment puts it near 81 percent.
Chicxulub: The Asteroid That Ended the Dinosaurs
About 66 million years ago a 10 km asteroid struck the Yucatan, and roughly three-quarters of all species, every non-avian dinosaur among them, vanished.
The Missoula Floods: The Deluge That Carved the Scablands
An Ice Age lake half the size of Lake Michigan burst its ice dam and emptied in days, over and over, carving the Channeled Scablands in the greatest freshwater floods known on Earth.
The Toba Supereruption: The Winter That Nearly Ended Us
About 74,000 years ago Toba erupted in Sumatra, the largest eruption in two million years. Whether its winter nearly ended the human line is one of archaeology's most genuinely open questions.
Vesuvius and Pompeii: The City Caught in Its Final Hour
In 79 CE Vesuvius held a 33 km column over the Bay of Naples, then buried Pompeii and Herculaneum where they stood, sealing a Roman world in ash.
The Younger Dryas Impact: Did a Comet Reset the Ice Age?
The Ice Age thaw stopped dead for 1,200 years, the megafauna died, and the Clovis hunters vanished. One hotly contested hypothesis says a comet was the trigger.