1. Spanish Flu
The Spanish Flu of 1918 also known as the 1918 Flu Pandemic was a deadly influenza pandemic that was caused due to H1N1 influenza A Virus. It infected 500 million people that is about a third of the world’s population at the time from the period of Spring 1918 to the early Summer of 1919.
2. 2012, Maya 'Doomsday' Calendar
According to the Calendar of the ‘Maya Civilization’, on 21st December 2012 cataclysmic events were bound to happen. Some of the astronomical alignments and numerological formulae suggested that the date marks the ‘doomsday or end of the World. Though the Scholars dismissed these predictions it did create panic among the people.
3. Comet Hyakutake
Comet Hyakutake was a comet, discovered on 31 January 1996. dubbed ‘The Great Comet of 1996’, its passage near the Earth was one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years. Astronomer Yuji Hyakutake saw it approaching the Earth, leading astronomers to notice X-rays being emitted from a comet for the first time.
4. 1950 Broken Arrow
‘Broken Arrow is a code name for a nuclear incident, which happened in August of 1950. The Boeing B-29 Super fortress was a four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber that was headed for Guam and crashed at a California Air Base. 5,000 pounds of explosives were detonated and 19 people died as the result. If the bomb had been armed with its fissile capsule, potentially 100,000 people could have been killed.
5. Carrington Event
The solar storm of 1859 (also known as the Carrington Event) was a powerful geomagnetic storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). After two fireballs erupted from sunspots, telegraph communications around the globe were destroyed. The sky was so bright that people thought the morning had begun.
6. Asteroid 2018 GE3
In April of 2018, an asteroid approximately three-quarters of a mile wide missed Earth by the galactic equivalent of a hair’s breadth. It came between the Earth and the moon and was nearly twice as close to the Earth as the moon. Also, it was not spotted by astronomers until 21 hours before it hurtled past Earth at more than 76,000 miles per hour, much faster than most objects that get near Earth.
7. Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, the Caribbean Crisis, or the Missile Scare. During which leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff. It came to a close when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove Russian missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise from the United States to respect Cuba’s territorial sovereignty.
8. Eruption of Mount Thera
The Minoan eruption was a major catastrophic volcanic eruption that devastated the Aegean island of Thera around 1600 BC. It was four to five times more powerful than the more widely known Krakatoa event in 1883. Earth was covered with enough ash to bring on darkness all over the world. Geologists believe the energy emitted from the blast was that of hundreds of atomic bombs exploding in a fraction of a second.
9. The Black Death Plague
The Black Death Plague, also known as the Pestilence and the Plague, was the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history from 1347 to 1351, resulting in the deaths of up to 75–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, wiping out 60 per cent of Europe’s population. It still exists in some parts and between 1900 and 2015, the US had 1,036 human plague cases with an average of 9 cases per year. In 2015, 16 people in the Western States developed the plague.
10. The Windscale Fire
The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in Great Britain’s history. The fire took place in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale facility on the northwest coast of England in Cumberland. The outcome was INES Level 5 (accident with wider consequences) and recorded 240 additional cases of thyroid cancer in the result.
By- Habiba Zaidi
