Deadly Disasters

Many of our most densely populated cities are situated on the Earth's most seismically active fault lines.

With a combination of torrential rain, powerful winds, and devastating storm surges, Hurricanes are among Mother Nature's most calamitous natural disasters.

The Tornado is one of Mother Nature's most extraordinary phenomena. These intense, rapidly rotating columns of air can attain wind speeds of more than 480 kilometres per hour, and have been witnessed on every continent except Antarctica.

In Japanese, Tsunami translates to "harbour wave." They are unleashed when a major disturbance occurs underwater, creating a series of enormous, deadly swells. Using survivor testimony and fascinating expert insights, we'll investigate these two unimaginable modern tragedies.

Featuring interviews from leading weather experts such as Karsten Haustein from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, this episode of Deadly Disasters will focus on Blizzards and extreme cold weather events from all over the world, including a pair of historic blizzards that hit the mid-Atlantic coast of America in 2010, and a shocking storm that struck Central Europe in 2017.

Nothing can be done to prevent a landslide once it starts; they are among the most ferocious and devastating forces in nature. Using survivor testimony and fascinating expert insights, we examine three of the most terrifying mudslides in recent history.

In this episode of Deadly Disasters, we'll look at terrifying examples of active and dormant volcanoes from all over the globe, from Vesuvius in Italy to Kilauea on the island of Hawaii. We'll hear from some of the world's leading volcanologists and discover why these violent eruptions of ash and lava are one of Mother Nature's most versatile killers.

Using extraordinary footage and fascinating insights from experts like Friederike Otto, Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, we'll examine two of the most blistering heatwaves in recent history, discovering why this extreme weather event is one of Mother Nature's most unrelenting killers.

With an ever more mobile world population, potentially growing in size to 11 billion people by the next century, public health experts agree that the possibility of a cataclysmic disease spreading to all parts of the globe is more likely now than ever before.

Water may seem harmless, but in enormous quantities, it can be an astonishingly destructive force. Apart from famine, floods have resulted in more deaths worldwide than any other natural disaster.