Volcanoes are utterly glorious things – Earth’s forges and crucibles, and the greatest firework shows you’ll ever see. They are, of course, also sometimes incredibly dangerous, particularly when they haven’t erupted in some time and take people by surprise. Take this clip here of a person, possibly a volcanologist, trying to outrun a pyroclastic flow, for example.
Volcanic eruptions are merely one of many in Earth’s repertoire of natural disasters, however. Don’t forget, this is an active world full of droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, avalanches, earthquakes, and more – and the planet never cares how inconvenient it may be to trigger one, or considers what may lay in its path. This is physics and geoscience at its most brutal.
Since I shared that clip of the lucky death-dodging volcanologist, I’ve had some requests to find some more examples of people that have narrowly survived the sudden onset of a natural disaster. So, without further ado, here are three clips that demonstrate how tiny we seem when facing up to the power of Mother Nature.
In this clip, we see mountaineers and climbers at Mount Everest’s base camp on the 25th April 2015. This happened to be the day that a major earthquake struck the region, killing 9,000 and injuring almost 22,000 in Nepal. Registering as a 8.1M event, its effects were felt across multiple countries. Several landslides were triggered, as well as several avalanches.
One occurred in the Langtang Valley, on the border of Tibet and Nepal, were several hundred people went missing. An avalanche also occurred on Mount Everest, and 21 people lost their lives. Those in this video were extremely lucky to be alive, but as you can see, it was an incredibly close call.
In this next clip, climbers making their way up Mount Ontake in Japan back in 2014 were shocked when the stratovolcano suddenly erupted, triggering quick-forming ash-laden flows that rushed down the mountain. It seems that water found its way through to the superheated rock just above the magmatic plumbing, which triggered steam blasts and a hydrothermal eruption – a highly unpredictable event.
Around 63 people died in the eruption, and the climbers seen in this video happened to be on a flank that received far less of the destructive flows. Once again, they were incredibly fortunate not to have died here.
In this final clip, storm chasers pursue a tornado outside of Wray, Colorado. Chasing tornadoes is incredibly dangerous to say the least – their winds can reach up to 512 kilometres per hour, faster than any hurricane. Sometimes, storm chases use specially designed vehicles that can sit in the middle of most tornados and just get shaken around a fair bit, but most of the time, ordinary cars are used.
If these particular storm chasers had gotten ahead of themselves a little bit, the windy beast appearing before them would have flung them into the air. Lucky timing, with a breadth of experience, saved them here.
