Every year, some of the deadliest natural disasters — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, wildfires and droughts — kill nearly 60,000 people, according to Global Change Data Lab.
Violent natural disasters have been a fact of human life since the beginning of humankind, but the death counts of the most ancient of these disasters are lost to history. The ancient Mediterranean island of Thera (now Santorini, Greece), for example, experienced a catastrophic volcanic eruption that eradicated the entire Minoan civilization around 1600 B.C., according to a 2020 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. But exactly how many lives were lost? We'll never know.
