Catastrophe Explained
Catastrophe or catastrophic comes from the Greek κατά (kata) = down; στροφή (strophē) = turning (Greek, Modern (1453-);: [[wikt:καταστροφή|καταστροφή]]|link=no). It may refer to the following:
A general or specific event
- Disaster, a devastating event
- The Asia Minor Catastrophe, a Greek name for the 1923 Greek defeat at the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey after the defeat
- The Holocaust, also known by the Hebrew name HaShoah which translates to "The Catastrophe"
- The Chernobyl Catastrophe, a name of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster
- Blue sky catastrophe, a type of bifurcation of a periodic orbit, where the orbit vanishes into the blue sky
- Catastrophic failure, complete failure of a system from which recovery is impossible (e.g. a bridge collapses)
- Climatic catastrophe, forced transition of climate system to a new climate state at a rate which is more rapid than the rate of change of the external forcing
- Ecological catastrophe, a disaster to the natural environment due to human activity
- Error catastrophe, extinction of an organism as a result of excessive mutations
- The Ikiza, which translates to the catastrophe from Kirundi
- Impending climatic catastrophe, conjectured runaway climate change resulting from a rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system
- Infrared catastrophe or infrared divergence is a situation in particle physics in which a particular integral diverges
- Iron catastrophe, runaway melting of early Earth's interior as a result of potential energy release from sinking iron and nickel melted by heat of radioactive decay
- Late Bronze Age collapse
- Malthusian catastrophe, prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth has outpaced agricultural production
- Mitotic catastrophe, an event in which a cell is destroyed during mitosis
- The Nakba in Arabic.
- Nedelin catastrophe or Nedelin disaster, launch pad accident at Baikonur test range of Baikonur Cosmodrome
- Oxygen catastrophe, the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere
- Runaway climate change or Climatic catastrophe, hypothesized runaway global warming when a tipping point is exceeded
- Toba catastrophe hypothesis, hypothesis that the Toba supervolcanic eruption caused a global volcanic winter and 1,000-year-long cooling episode
- Ultraviolet catastrophe, the prediction by classical physics that a black body will emit radiation at infinite power
- Vacuum catastrophe, the discrepancy between theoretical and measured vacuum energy density in cosmology
Art, entertainment, and media
Fictional entities
Film
Literature
Music
- Catastrophic (band), a band featuring Trevor Peres
Television
Mathematics
- Catastrophe theory, a theory by the French mathematician René Thom and the object of its study
See also
