Forces of Nature: 50 Earth's Most Violent Events

The eruption of Krakatoa was heard three thousand miles away. It remains the loudest sound in recorded history.The pressure wave circled the globe seven times before it faded below the sensitivity of the barometers tracking it.Forces of Nature is an illustrated account of fifty events that reshaped landscapes and ended cities - earthquakes, eruptions, floods, storms and impacts - each with an original painting.Inside you will find: - When the Earth Opens - from the Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, still the deadliest in history, to Tōhoku in 2011- Mountains That Explode - Vesuvius, Tambora and the eruption that gave the world a year without a summer- Water in Motion - the Indian Ocean tsunami, the wave that stripped a forest 524 metres up an Alaskan mountainside, and the dam that killed 1,900 people without breaking- Wind and Sky - Galveston, the deadliest cyclone ever recorded, and four days of London smog that killed thousands- Impacts and Deep Time - Chicxulub, the Siberian Traps, and a solar storm that set telegraph wires sparking in 1859Running through all fifty is a single finding: the biggest events are almost never the deadliest. The largest earthquake ever recorded killed a few thousand people. One a thousand times smaller killed hundreds of thousands. What decides the outcome is rarely the geology - it is construction, terrain, timing, warning, and whether anyone acted on it.Illustrated throughout with original paintings. Death tolls are given as the contested estimates they are.