America has had its fair share of natural disasters. In the last few years alone there have been record-breaking heat waves across the country, California has had its worst-ever wildfire season and the western US has experienced its worst drought in 1,200 years. Yet, sadly, natural disasters could become the new normal, as the UN reports that climate change has driven a fivefold increase in the number of weather-related disasters in the last 50 years. We’ve rounded up the events that could wreak havoc in the near future.
Located in a zone of overlapping fault lines, including the infamous San Andreas Fault, California is at high risk of earthquakes with fears that a mega-quake could strike. The predicted event has gained such notoriety that it’s become known as ‘the Big One’. The state’s last major earthquake was in 1906. With a magnitude of 7.9, the shaking was felt all along the western coast from Los Angeles up to southern Oregon with a particularly devastating impact in San Francisco, where the death toll was estimated to be more than 3,000.
The San Andreas Fault typically ruptures once every 150 years, which has led some experts to argue that southern California is overdue for a major earthquake. A federal report released in 2008 suggested that the most probable outcome is a 7.8-magnitude quake – which would cover an area of around 50 square miles (129sq km) and could wreak havoc on infrastructure, leading to fires and widespread power outages.
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It will come as no surprise to most that swathes of the US are in danger of devastating wildfires in the coming decades. Few could forget the terrifying blazes that have whipped across California, Oregon and large parts of western America in recent years. Since 2002, California has lost an enormous 87,742 acres of land to fires, with Georgia, Texas, North Carolina and Florida following behind as the worst-affected states.
According to new data released by nonprofit research group First Street Foundation, half of all properties in the lower 48 states face some degree of wildfire risk. Surprisingly, the state most at risk was Florida, where almost 200,000 properties faced at least a 1% wildfire risk in 2022, due to its high vegetation coverage which can spread flames rapidly. Texas and California were in second and third place respectively.
There are three main types of flooding in the US: coastal, river and flash. The latter is typically the most deadly, occurring after rapid accumulation of rainfall that can't drain into the ground. In 2022 alone there were 103 fatalities from flooding while 665,000 people were displaced. More than 3.3 million Americans lost homes in natural disasters in 2022, a startling number which means that 1.3% of the adult population was left homeless by hurricanes, floods, fires, tornadoes or other disasters.
Worryingly, these events are predicted to become more frequent and extreme in the coming decades. A study led by the University of Oklahoma found that if climate change continues at the current rate, floods would become 8% ‘flashier’ (meaning that rapid rainfall would occur quickly in concentrated areas) by the end of the century. The southwest of the country is predicted to be a hotspot and is estimated to experience a 10% increase in flash flooding. Pictured here is a flash flood in Florida which occurred after Hurricane Nicole in November 2022.
They might seem like the stuff of sci-fi, but sinkholes are a real and terrifying threat to many parts of America. For example, in 2010 a freeze event in Dover, a suburb of Tampa, Florida, led to the formation of more than 110 sinkholes, which destroyed properties, infrastructure and farmland. Pictured here is a large sinkhole which occurred on the Pacific Highway in Pensacola, Florida in 2014 after heavy rains and flash flooding.
But just how do these strange events occur in the first place? According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), sinkholes form in areas where the rock type below the land surface can naturally be dissolved by the groundwater circulating through it, like limestone, carbonate rock and saltbeds. This makes around a fifth of the country susceptible to the phenomenon. Human activity can accelerate sinkhole formation, as practices like groundwater pumping can cause disruption between the underlying cavity rocks and surrounding materials. Currently, the states with the most sinkholes are Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
While not particularly common, large tsunamis have struck the US before and it’s highly likely they’ll happen again. One of the worst in recent history occurred in 1946, when an earthquake off the coast of the Aleutian Islands led to a giant series of waves rolling across the Pacific. The event had a devastating impact on Hawaii and killed 159 people. Meanwhile in 1964 an earthquake in the Gulf of Alaska spawned a swell of deadly tsunamis across the Pacific Northwest, killing 131 and causing devastating damage.
The USGS notes that large tsunamis "will undoubtedly occur again" in America. Subduction zones (tectonic boundaries where two plates converge) along the Caribbean Sea mean that Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are more susceptible than other locations in the eastern US. Pictured here is a hazard zone sign which was displayed in Segundo, California in January 2022, after a volcanic eruption in Tonga caused the National Weather Service to issue warnings across the entire west coast.
It’s a well-known fact that heatwaves will become more frequent and intense thanks to climate change, and the US certainly isn’t immune to these deadly disasters. In fact, heatwaves kill more Americans each year than any other extreme weather event, according to the National Weather Service, with an average of 105 people dying annually between 2012 and 2021 with 190 deaths recorded in 2021 alone.
The risk of heatwaves across the country could increase by 30% in the coming years, according to a 2022 study published in the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences journal. In the research, scientists found that the atmospheric circulation patterns which lead to deadly heatwaves are being made significantly more extreme by greenhouse gases.
Lurking beneath the otherworldly beauty of Yellowstone National Park there’s a terrifying threat: an enormous supervolcano which, if it had another large eruption, could obliterate swathes of the country. Fortunately, the chances of that happening are pretty small. In the entirety of its history, the giant underground caldera has only had three major eruptions. One was 2.1 million years ago, another was 1.3 million years ago and the most recent was 664,000 years ago.
If it were to explode, the impact would be felt worldwide. It's likely that the states of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Colorado would be buried beneath pyroclastic flow, while other parts of the US could be affected by falling ash. Meanwhile, such an event could affect the global climate for years or even decades afterwards. In 2021, new research coordinated by Oregon State University found that a ‘super-eruption’ could be more likely than first thought, as it found evidence that eruptions can occur without the presence of liquid magma.
In recent years, the US has been hit by a deluge of extreme winter weather. There were the blizzards that hit the east coast in February 2010 (dubbed ‘Snowmaggedon’), the historic winter storms that tore across the mid-Atlantic in January 2016 and of course the terrifying cold snap of Christmas 2022. More than 60 people died during the latest deadly freeze and thousands were left without power during the bitterly cold conditions.
But if global warming means it’s getting hotter, why is it that these events will become more common? Scientists predict that the climate crisis will make blizzards more intense because hotter air can hold more moisture, which has to fall as either rain or snow. Plus, rising ocean temperatures means that storms have more energy and moisture, adding to their intensity.
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There were a whopping 1,376 tornadoes in the US in 2021 alone, which were responsible for a combined death toll of more than 100. These devastating disasters, caused when a rotating column of air from a thunderstorm hits the ground, are among the 18 natural hazards included in the National Risk Index. In 2022, the strongest tornado took place in Georgia, with wind speeds of up to 185 miles per hour (298km/h).
Based on National Risk Index data from 2021, the states most at risk from tornadoes are Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Georgia and Kentucky. In Texas, one of the worst tornadoes on record broke out in 1997, leading to almost $205 million (£170.2m) of damage to homes (figures adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire and Oregon were considered least at risk based on the 2021 data.
The US is among the most volcanically active countries on Earth and experienced a whopping 120 eruptions between 1980 and 2018 alone. The largest event in that period was probably the explosion of Washington’s Mount St Helens in 1980 (pictured), which triggered a huge avalanche that covered an estimated volume of 3.3 billion cubic yards (2.5 cubic km) – equivalent to one million Olympic swimming pools.
The USGS released its latest Volcanic Threat Assessment in 2018, which identified 161 US volcanoes as posing a risk to lives and property. Of these, the most dangerous peaks were located in Alaska, California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii. Notable recent eruptions include that of Mauna Loa, on Hawaii’s Big Island, which spewed out enormous flows of lava, smoke and ash in November 2022 – its first eruption in 38 years.