20 Extreme Weather Events That Changed The Course Of History

Kublai Khan, Mongol emperor of China’s Yuan Dynasty, dispatched fleets to invade Japan when the Japanese rulers would not pay tribute. A gale destroyed his first invasion fleet off Hakata Bay in 1274. Seven years later, in 1281, a second fleet of some 4,000 ships and more than 100,000 troops was anchored off Kyushu when a massive typhoon struck, drowning tens of thousands of soldiers. The Japanese called the storms kamikaze, divine wind, and Kublai Khan gave up on the invasion permanently.

The Spanish Armada was dispatched by King Philip II of Spain to invade Protestant England in 1588. The Armada’s commander-in-chief then set sail north along the west coast of Scotland and Ireland, after English fireships drove the Spanish ships off course from their planned Channel passage. A fierce, unseasonable gale on the Atlantic coast destroyed more than 60 ships against Irish and Scottish rocks, and less than half the men survived to return to Spain. The Dutch minted a medal in Zeeland that summarized the outcome with the words: “God blew and they were scattered.”

In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched on Russia with more than 500,000 men, hoping to coerce Tsar Alexander I into blocking British trade. He arrived at a burned-out, deserted Moscow in September, and retreated the following month. By then, many had been lost to disease and desertion, while Russia’s scorched earth strategy killed off supplies and livestock. An early freeze set in, with temperatures hovering at nearly −30°C. Roads disappeared under thick ice, horses perished in their tracks, and soldiers froze to death. Fewer than 100,000 made it home.

In October 1415, King Henry V of England led about 6,000 depleted soldiers, most of them longbowmen, toward a far bigger French force in Agincourt, France. The field between two forests was narrow and freshly plowed, and days of heavy rain had drenched it. When French knights rode out, they sank to their knees in the muck and got stuck in a traffic jam, some crushed by their own men as they fell down. English archers advanced on them. The French lost thousands of men, and Henry was later named heir to the French throne.

In 1900, Galveston, Texas, was one of the country’s most important ports. It was so successful that it was known as “the Jewel of the South.” Local forecaster Isaac Cline told residents that the island’s elevation was such that a major storm surge could not occur. But a hurricane moved through that year, ripping thousands of wooden buildings from their foundations. Somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people died, with around 8,000 commonly given as the final toll. It remains the nation’s deadliest natural disaster. Investors moved port business inland to Houston. Galveston never got it back.

In the 1910s and 1920s, farmers in the southern Great Plains had turned the native prairie grass into wheat fields. By 1930, when drought hit, no grass roots remained to anchor the topsoil, and high winds blew millions of tons of topsoil into huge “black blizzard” dust storms. These storms wiped out farms and caused about 2.5 million people to leave the Plains, mostly for California. The U.S. government established a soil conservation program that instructed farmers how to plow around the contours of hills, as well as how to rotate crops.

The massive eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in April 1815 spewed sulfate particles into the atmosphere, chilling the Earth. The following year, New England and northern Europe endured frosts in the summer, even snow in June, while crop failures on three continents triggered bread riots in Europe. Historians widely argue that horse feed shortages and horse deaths led Karl Drais, a German inventor, to create his 1817 walking machine, the precursor to the bicycle. A similarly dismal summer forced Mary Shelley to stay indoors in Switzerland, where she penned Frankenstein.

In 9 AD, Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of Germania, led three legions into unknown territory. He was tricked by Arminius, a Germanic chieftain secretly forming a tribal confederacy while working as an officer in the Roman army. In the Teutoburg Forest, a storm raged for days, making the only road muddy and drenching the legionaries’ cumbersome shields. Germanic warriors killed all three legions in four days, totaling 20,000 soldiers. After that, Rome abandoned its goal of conquering Germania, and the Rhine River remained the border for hundreds of years.

England was at war in Europe, and Royal Navy ships were stationed on the southern coast when, in November 1703, a powerful windstorm hit. Roofs of churches were torn off, and more than 100 merchant ships along with 13 Royal Navy warships sank. The storm also destroyed the Eddystone Lighthouse off Plymouth, where the lighthouse’s builder, Henry Winstanley, was killed. Some 8,000 people perished. Writer Daniel Defoe compiled eyewitness accounts into a book, The Storm, starting a genre of weather reporting.

In 1927, hundreds of thousands of Black sharecroppers worked the fertile soil of the Mississippi Delta, then under Jim Crow, relying only on levees as protection from flooding. Months of heavy rain broke those levees in April, inundating 27,000 square miles of farmland throughout seven states for several months. More than 200 were killed, and over 630,000 people lost their homes. Families were placed in segregated camps, and conditions there prompted many to participate in the Great Migration to northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

When disaster hit central China in 1931, the country’s Yangtze and Huai River valleys were intensely cultivated under the government of Chiang Kai-shek. That spring, heavy winter snow melted rapidly, and there followed an unusually intense monsoon season. In July alone, there were seven tropical cyclones, two being the norm. The rivers overflowed their banks, and the inundated region was underwater for many months. Wuhan and Nanjing were submerged. Estimates vary as to the number killed, from one million to four million, most of them from hunger and disease rather than drowning.

In 1788, France, ruled by King Louis XVI, was deeply in debt, and bread was the main food of common families. The wheat and rye crop was weakened by a drought during the spring, and a terrible hailstorm blew across central and northern France in July, destroying much of the grain and fruit still remaining in orchards. During the following winter, bread prices reached their highest point during the century, and food riots broke out. To deal with the growing crisis, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General the following spring, the first time it had been called in 175 years, triggering the French Revolution.

By the 1880s, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were running their trains above ground with telegraph and electrical wires strung overhead through the streets. A stalled coastal storm in March 1888 dumped as much as 50 inches of snow in some areas with hurricane-force winds. Elevated trains stalled on their tracks, and overhead wires collapsed, cutting off communications for days. More than 400 people perished. The disaster convinced city leaders to move critical infrastructure underground. Within a decade, Boston opened the nation’s first subway, and New York wasn’t far behind.

Charles XII, King of Sweden, was deep in Russia in 1709, seeking to overthrow Tsar Peter the Great. During that winter, an Arctic air mass swept over Western and Central Europe, causing temperatures to plummet to record levels. Rivers froze solid, as did parts of the Baltic Sea, and the winter wheat crops were killed. France, at war with the rest of Europe under King Louis XIV, lost up to 600,000 people to the ensuing famine. In Ukraine, the frost decimated Charles’ forces and, weakened by hunger, the Swedes were routed by Peter’s army at Poltava later that summer, ending the Swedish Empire as a major European power.

General George Washington’s Continental Army had nowhere to run. In August of 1776, they had been defeated at the Battle of Long Island, and British forces under General William Howe were rapidly approaching. They were trapped against Brooklyn’s East River, which was blocked by warships that were ready to close in and prevent them from escaping. Fortunately for the Americans, strong northeasterly winds prevented the British ships from heading up the river. Washington began pulling his men back across the river in small boats through the night. When the sun rose, a thick fog settled in, keeping the soldiers hidden from British guards who were only a few hundred yards away. Not one of the roughly 9,000 soldiers was killed.

During the War of 1812, on August 24, 1814, British troops took control of Washington, D.C. They torched the Capitol and the White House. A violent storm spawned a powerful tornado the next day that tore off the roofs of buildings and even picked up British artillery and tossed it. Several troops were killed when the walls of a nearby building fell in around them. Torrential rainfall extinguished the fires, and the stone walls of both buildings survived. With the loss of life, the British quickly left, completing their 26-hour occupation that evening.

It was January of 1362, and farmers in the low-lying coastal areas of northern Europe were relying on their hand-built earth dikes to keep the North Sea at bay. Then a ferocious Atlantic storm drove a massive surge of seawater that smashed through the flimsy dikes in a catastrophic event now known as the Grote Mandrenke, or Great Drowning of Men. Between 25,000 and 30,000 perished, including the inhabitants of Rungholt, an important commercial port once thought to be mythical and then unearthed by marine archaeologists hundreds of years later.

In September 394 AD, Theodosius I, the Eastern Roman emperor and a devoted Christian, led his army to war against the western Roman forces of the usurper Eugenius, whose support included many pagan aristocrats eager for a return to Rome’s traditional religion. On the second day of the battle, the Bora, a violent regional wind that rushes down a particular valley, blew dust and rain in the face of the enemy soldiers, while blowing some of the weapons back upon them. Christian authors of the era attributed the wind to divine aid. Theodosius was victorious, and Nicene Christianity became Rome’s official state religion.

Farms, mills, and river transport in Renaissance Europe relied on a steady supply of rain. In 1540, a stalled weather system stopped the advance of storm systems for almost a whole year, and from February to November, Western and Central Europe saw very little rain. The Rhine, Seine, Loire, and Elbe dropped so low that people walked over the bed, and fire consumed much of France, Germany, and Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of humans and millions of animals perished, leading cities to dig deeper wells and completely change how they handled food storage.

The coastal areas of the Netherlands, eastern England, and Belgium had diking systems that had not been modernized since before World War II. A strong Atlantic storm hit with a high spring tide in early 1953, driving a huge flood wave over and through the dikes at dozens of locations, inundating much of the land in the Netherlands. More than 2,100 people died in the three countries, primarily in the Netherlands. As a result, the Dutch government paid for the Delta Works, a system of storm barriers and dikes that protects the country today.

This content was created with the help of AI.