Catastrophe

Look up catastrophe in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Catastrophe or catastrophic comes from the Greek κατά (kata) = down; στροφή (strophē) = turning (Greek: καταστροφή). 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
  • The Holocaust, also known by the Hebrew name HaShoah which translates to "The Catastrophe"
  • The Chernobyl catastrophe, also known as the 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)
  • Climate catastrophe, also known as climate apocalypse
  • 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, in Central Africa
  • 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
  • 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
  • Nakba, Arabic word meaning catastrophe, referring to the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, and ongoing ethnic cleansing by Israel of Palestinian Arabs
  • Nedelin catastrophe, launch pad accident at Baikonur test range of Baikonur Cosmodrome
  • Oxygen catastrophe, the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere
  • Toba catastrophe theory, 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

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