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23 Types of Natural Disasters

John Spacey, February 11, 2022

Natural disasters are major adverse events that result from natural processes. These are typically related to weather, geological processes or space. Natural disasters imply events that are sudden and somewhat unpredictable as opposed to slow running processes such as desertification. Humans can contribute to natural disasters as they influence things such as climate, ecosystems and landforms. Likewise, humans have the potential to prevent or mitigate certain types of natural disasters. For example, reducing avalanches with infrastructure such as snow racks, avalanche snow bridges and snow nets. The following are common types of natural disaster.

Avalanches	Cold Waves / Extreme Cold
Droughts	Dust Storms / Sandstorms
Earthquakes	Floods / Flash Floods
Hailstorms	Heat Waves / Extreme Heat
Hurricanes & Typhoons	Ice Storms
Impact Events (i.e. impact of asteroids, meteoroids or comets)	Landslides & Mudslides
Limnic Eruptions	Severe Storms
Severe Thunderstorms / Supercell Thunderstorms	Sinkholes
Solar Flares / Geomagnetic Storms	Tornadoes
Tropical Storms	Tsunami
Volcanic Eruptions / Supervolcanic Eruption	Wildfires / Firestorms
Winter Storms & Blizzards

A limnic eruption is a rare type of natural disaster whereby carbon dioxide suddenly erupts from a lake forming a dangerous gas cloud. These can also cause a lake tsunami.

Tropical cyclones have several names as follows. These are all basically the same type of storm.