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    101 Amazing Facts about Natural Disasters
    101 Amazing Facts about Natural Disasters
    101 Amazing Facts about Natural Disasters
    Ebook66 pages44 minutes

    101 Amazing Facts about Natural Disasters

    By Jack Goldstein and Frankie Taylor

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    About this ebook

    What exactly is an avalanche? Why do tropical cyclones spin in different directions? What is the deadliest heat wave ever to have been recorded? And what are the three different types of lightning? All of this and more is revealed in this fantastic book containing over one hundred facts about the world’s most deadly natural disasters. Covering floods, cyclones, landslides, avalanches, tsunamis, fires, earthquakes, blizzards, heatwaves, volcanoes and lightning, this is a fascinating addition to any fact-lover’s collection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAUK Authors
    Release dateJul 21, 2015
    ISBN9781785382093

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      Book preview

      101 Amazing Facts about Natural Disasters - Jack Goldstein

      www.jackgoldsteinbooks.com

      Floods

      In the simplest possible terms, a flood is when water covers land that is not normally submerged. A flood can happen due to the overflow of water from a river or lake, or because there is too much rainwater for a given area of ground to drain away. Whereas some floods happen slowly, with the build-up taking place over an extended period of time, others happen very quickly; we refer to these as flash floods.

      The word flood that we use today comes from the Old English word flot, itself deriving from Latin words such as fluctus (translating as both flood and disorder) and flumen (a river or stream).

      Many cultures across the world feature stories of a flood sent by an angry deity, often with one sole ‘good’ man surviving the deluge. The Epic of Gilgamesh written in 700 BC tells of Utnapishtim, an immortal man who was instructed by the God Ea to build a huge boat in which he could save his family and the animals of the world from a huge flood which was about to destroy the world. Plato’s Timaeus tells us that the God Zeus became angry at the Bronze race of humans who were constantly waging war, and decided to punish them with a flood. The Hebrew Bible speaks of Noah, the one righteous man saved from the flood along with his family and the animals of the earth when he builds an ark.

      There are five key categories of flood. An areal flood is caused by rainfall, where ground is saturated and the falling water cannot run off quickly enough. A riverine flood is one where a river breaks its banks due to an increased amount of water finding its way into the river upstream. A combination of winds and low pressure can cause a sea tidal surge - an estuarine flood, and urban flooding is that caused by rainfall overwhelming the capacity of human-made drainage systems. The last type is the catastrophic flood, which is caused by a major event such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption or even the bursting of a dam.

      Floods can be both negative and positive events. Many countries carefully manage their flood defences, as it can be hugely costly to repair the damage when a river bursts its banks near to a built-up area, and it is devastating to farms that are within the flood plain. However, some communities - especially the ancient civilizations along rivers such as the Nile, Ganges and Indus rivers - relied on periodic flooding for their livelihoods. A flood will make soil more fertile, increasing its nutrients, and can even kill pests in arid farmland.

      The 1931 China floods are considered to be among the deadliest natural disasters ever to have affected the human race. The two previous years had seen extreme droughts, until the winter of 1930 and the heavy snowstorms that it brought. Rains in the spring saw river levels rise significantly, and these continued - along with cyclone activity - through the summer. In July and August of 1931 there were nine cyclones that affected the region, and both the Yangtze and Huai Rivers overflowed with catastrophic effects, especially

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