Environmental Disasters

The cabin had always been a special retreat for Isherwood Williams, a haven from the demands of society. But one day while hiking, Ish was bitten by a rattlesnake, and the solitude he had so desired took on dire new significance. Ish headed home when he finally felt himself again—and noticed the strangeness almost immediately. No cars passed him on the road; the gas station not far from his cabin looked abandoned; and he was shocked to see the body of a man on the roadside near a small town. Without a radio or phone, Ish had no idea of humanity’s abrupt demise.

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements - earthquake, fires, and recovery - profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco's perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts.

Bill Gates shares what he's learned in more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address the problems, and sets out a vision for how the world can build the tools it needs to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. Bill Gates explains why he cares so deeply about climate change and what makes him optimistic that the world can avoid the most dire effects of the climate crisis. Gates says, "We can work on a local, national, and global level to build the technologies, businesses, and industries to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."

From Hiroshima to Chernobyl, Fukushima to the growing legacy of lethal radioactive waste, humanity's struggle to conquer atomic energy is rife with secrecy, deceit, human error, blatant disregard for life, short-sighted politics, and fear. Fallout is an eye-opening odyssey through the first eight decades of this struggle and the radioactive landscapes it has left behind. We are, Pearce finds, forever torn between technological hubris and all-too-human terror about what we have created.

A single faulty sensor. A town blissfully unaware of the poison in the air. For Elena Markham, a brilliant and dedicated nuclear engineer, it’s the start of a thirty-hour nightmare. When her instruments detect a critical anomaly at the St. Croix Nuclear Facility, her superiors dismiss it as a minor glitch. With a major safety audit looming, they’re more concerned with appearances than with a potential catastrophe. As management actively works to bury her findings and silence her warnings, Elena finds herself in a desperate race against time. The reactor's core is unstable, and the ...

Today’s UV Index: Lethal Deep inside the sun, magnetic lines of force are growing…building in ways not experienced for a millennium. When a pair of increasingly severe solar storms disables internet, communications, and GPS for millions around the globe, helioseismologist Greyson Finn fears the imminent arrival of a cataclysmic super flare, a magnetic explosion of the sun with the potential to obliterate life on earth. In a desperate bid to help the world prepare, Finn and his fellow scientists rush to address the critical question: will the solar weather subside, or is the worst yet to...

Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra's family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price.

The world is clean. The world is dead. The EcoMites were humanity's greatest achievement—microscopic machines that dissolved pollution, purified water, and healed our dying planet. Then their definition of "pollution" changed. Now they consume everything organic. Everything alive. Everything except one man and his sanctuary. Dr. Joseph Kellerman is the last man on Earth, surviving alone at Alaska's Aurora Station while generators fail one by one. Outside his protective bubble, the air shimmers with invisible death. Inside, he talks to ghosts—his dead wife, his lost colleagues—as his ...

Journalist Andrew Lewis chronicles the struggle of his New Jersey hometown to rebuild their ravaged homes in the face of the same environmental stresses and governmental neglect that are endangering coastal areas throughout the United States. Lewis grew up on the Bayshore, a 40-mile stretch of Delaware Bay beaches, marshland, and fishing hamlets at the southern end of New Jersey, whose working-class community is fighting to retain their place in a country that has left them behind.

Read by Peter Kenny, award-winning narrator of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. In a ravaged near-future England, a private detective with psychic powers might be the last hope standing between mankind and total collapse. Mindstar Rising is the first cyberpunk thriller in Peter F. Hamilton's...

Looking to discover the ins and outs of gold mining safety? Look no further than Digging for Gold, the comprehensive new eBook. From the history of gold mining accidents to the environmental impact of mining operations, this book covers everything there is to know about staying safe while digging for gold. In Chapter 1, readers will embark on a fascinating journey through the history of gold mining accidents, examining past incidents in order to better prepare for the future. In Chapter 2, we take a closer look at the impact of gold mining on the environment, including lessons learned from ...

"A disaster thriller that will keep you sitting on the edge of the seat and holding your breath...Fast-paced and perfectly developed, the action never stops in Supertide, and relentlessly grows until the end. A must-read for thriller fans." - Reader's Favorite A "terrifying, science-driven thriller...Freeman humanizes the plot through scenes giving the perspective of ordinary people caught up in the cataclysm." - Publisher's Weekly No need to visit the ocean. The ocean is coming to visit you. Deep in the Atlantic, the ocean floor is shifting, changing in ways unseen for millions of years. ...

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry....

An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. T

The world is anything but serene and still. We are all vulnerable to natural threats, both internal and external. Meteor showers, asteroids are only a few of the factors likely to pose threats to the world from space. As for the seemingly solid earth, the planet's interior has an inner core of molten elements. It surely would not be an exaggeration to call this part of the earth, which remains invisible to our eyes, "a flaming core". There also exists an atmosphere surrounding the earth, which is a "shield" against external threats. Yet, no part of the earth is immune against the effects of...

When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, the world ends in ash and fire. For Harper Vega, it's just the beginning. Former Army medic Harper Vega is leading a wilderness survival course when the unthinkable happens—Yellowstone explodes in the largest volcanic eruption in human history. As ash clouds blot out the sun and civilization collapses, Harper finds herself responsible for keeping a group of strangers alive in a poisoned wasteland. But she's not alone. Quinn Marshall, a brilliant geologist haunted by loss, becomes Harper's unlikely partner in a desperate journey toward the Canadian...

In the small town of Oakhaven, the annual Founder’s Day fair is a portrait of peaceful, American life. For EMT Mara Duvall and volunteer firefighter Cole Briggs, it’s a rare day off. But when the sky turns a sickly, nauseating green, the cheerful afternoon curdles into terror. A monster tornado descends on the town, but this is no ordinary storm. When the funnel passes over the site of an abandoned industrial works, it inhales decades of buried, forgotten poison. What it exhales is a toxic, black rain that coats everything in a greasy, deadly film. Trapped in a hardware store with a ...

Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes - they stem from the same forces that give our planet life. Earthquakes give us natural springs; volcanoes produce fertile soil. It is only when these forces exceed our ability to withstand them that they become disasters. Together they have shaped our cities and their architecture; elevated leaders and toppled governments; influenced the way we think, feel, fight, unite, and pray. The history of natural disasters is a history of ourselves.

Commander Aarav Cheran—a renowned nuclear physicist and Indian Naval analyst—is thrust into a crisis that no war game ever imagined. As two nuclear nations edge toward catastrophe, Aarav must navigate a fractured landscape of political power plays, military brinkmanship, and catastrophic technological failure. The fate of millions may rest on his ability to outmaneuver forces poised to plunge the world into chaos.

The eBook examines two of the most notorious chemical disasters in U.S. history—the Love Canal crisis in Niagara Falls, New York, and the Kepone contamination in Hopewell, Virginia. Both cases reveal how negligence, weak regulations, and poor oversight allowed dangerous industrial chemicals to poison communities and the environment. At Love Canal, Hooker Chemical buried more than 21,000 tons of hazardous waste beneath a site that later became home to a school and hundreds of houses. Decades later, leaking toxins brought illness, birth defects, and forced evacuations, turning the ...