These threats may be powerful – floods in the Philippines, earthquakes in Haiti – but they aren't deliberate.
Many restaurant employees once lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, where powerful floods reduced frame houses to kindling and scattered the workers to the winds.
But, in regions where the rock has built-in weaknesses, such as Iceland's heavily jointed basalt, canyon formation can happen in sudden bursts: Powerful floods can swiftly create canyons by plucking out giant blocks and casting them downstream.
West Virginia adversity became a sort of beat for Byers: coal's downsizing, the powerful floods that now regularly plague the region, the opioid epidemic that continues to ravage its small towns, the Donald Trump-like billionaire that has turned the governorship into a kind of performance art.
Millions of people across the mid-Atlantic region struggled to recover from widespread storm damage on Tuesday amid power failures, high winds, downed trees and powerful flooding.
The following year, in June 2006, an equally powerful flood refilled the crawl space with silt.
Thousands of victims in the poor, unstable state were already in camps for the displaced, including one in Kalay, Sagaing region, where residents described powerful flood waters swamping homes within hours.
Rather, Ciochon argues, the human fossils found there (which include a skullcap widely agreed to be H. erectus and a thigh bone that could belong to either H. erectus or H. sapiens, a matter of sharp debate) were washed into the site by a powerful flood, and nothing found with them including the shells can be assumed to have been associated with them originally.
A powerful flood submerged the town and destroyed most of the houses, with the walls and platforms heavily damaged.
Now we discover that not only are the oceans and the atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms, floods and ever-climbing sea levels, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too.
Australia risks going "backwards" on climate change, straining relations with small Pacific island states that are being hit by unusually powerful storms, floods, droughts and massive tides, according to the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands.
