The Deadliest Natural Disasters in History: 6 Devastating Storms

On January 23, 1556, an earthquake hit China’s Shaanxi province. It led to an estimated 830,000 deaths, making it the deadliest known earthquake in history. A 2025 research article in the journal Quaternary Science Advances suggests it might have had a magnitude of 7.3 to 7.9 on the Richter scale—large but nowhere near the strongest earthquakes ever recorded.

So, what made the 1556 earthquake so deadly? The initial deaths were caused by the collapse of buildings and cave dwellings in densely populated areas as well as landslides. The famine and disease that spread in the aftermath contributed to the total estimated deaths. Qin Keda, a survivor of the earthquake, wrote that other survivors responded to the disaster by building houses with softer materials like wood instead of stone to make them more earthquake-resistant and less likely to bury people alive.

The April 10, 1815, eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa is generally regarded as the deadliest volcanic eruption in history. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, estimates the eruption caused 100,000 deaths in the immediate aftermath. This includes people who died from the impact of volcanic debris and those who died from the starvation and disease caused by the eruption, which destroyed crops and poisoned wells.

In addition, the Tambora eruption had yearslong global climate effects that led to crop failures and disease spread around the world. Temperatures dropped so much that in Europe and North America, 1816 became known as “the year without a summer.” The eruption-related climate change ultimately spanned three years. Because of the Tambora eruption’s global impact, it is difficult to estimate how many deaths it ultimately contributed to.

In 1931, the Yangtze River, which runs through China, experienced severe flooding over several months. Heavy rains broke through dikes, leading to around 140,000 deaths from drowning and debris that crushed people to death. The resulting famine and disease from the devastation pushed the death toll to an estimated 2 million.

Part of what made the flood so deadly is that it happened during a period of extreme political instability and conflict, when maintaining infrastructure like dikes and granaries often fell by the wayside. “The underlying economic and political situation…meant that the hazard of the flood was translated into a spectacular disaster,” Courtney says. The government’s relief efforts were very poor, and many of the 52 million people impacted by the flood became refugees.

After the Chinese Civil War, the government made significant improvements to the infrastructure around the Yangtze River. Its surrounding embankments were stronger when another major flood hit in 1998. This meant that although the 1998 flood was larger than the one in 1931, its death toll was much lower, at an estimated 4,150 deaths.

Hurricanes and typhoons are both tropical cyclones; the names only refer to where a storm takes place. In the North Atlantic and parts of the North Pacific, these storms are called hurricanes. In the northwest Pacific, they are typhoons. And in the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, they are known simply as tropical cyclones or cyclones.

The deadliest known storm of this type is the Bhola cyclone that struck northeastern India and former East Pakistan on November 12, 1970, killing an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people. The Pakistani government’s slow response to the disaster helped fuel tensions that erupted the next year when East Pakistan declared itself the independent nation of Bangladesh.

Although the United States has a high concentration of tornadoes, these storms occur all over the world. The deadliest known one is the Daulatpur-Saturia tornado that struck central Bangladesh on April 26, 1989. The storm killed an estimated 1,300 people. Factors that contributed to the death toll included a lack of early warning systems, tornado shelters and buildings that could withstand tornado damage, combined with high population density.

On December 26, 2004, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake on the Indonesian island of Sumatra generated a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The tsunami left 227,898 people dead or missing across more than a dozen countries in Asia and Africa, with the highest casualties in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. The Indian Ocean tsunami is the deadliest tsunami on record, and it prompted a global humanitarian response.