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Castle Bravo
Castle Bravo was the code name given to the first United States test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb, detonated on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as the first test of Operation Castle. -
Silent Springs
Silent Spring is an environmental science book written by Rachel Carson and published in 1962. The book documented the detrimental effects on the environment—particularly on birds—of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. -
The Palomares Incident
Two air crafts collided spilli 40,000 gallons (151,000lts) of jet fuel, in the KC-135 exploded, killing its four man crew. Four members of the B-52s seven man crew were able to parachute to safety. Of the four unarmed B28 hydrogen bombs carried by the B-52 (a weapon with yields between 70 kilotons to 1.45 megatons), three crashed on the ground in the vicinity of Palomares, a poor farming community 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) off the coastal highway. The fourth sank off the coast and was missing f -
Door To Hell
Soviet scientists set it on fire to burn off noxious gases after the ground under a drilling rig gave way. Perhaps the scientists underestimated the amount of fuel that lay below—Turkmenistan has the sixth largest natural gas reserves in the world. -
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Explosion
The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown that occurred on March 28, 1979, in one of the two Three Mile Island nuclear reactors in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, United States. -
The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
Approximately 1,300 miles. 200 miles were heavily or moderately oiled (meaning the impact was obvious); 1,100 miles were lightly or very lightly oiled (meaning light sheen or occasional tarballs). By comparison, there is more than 9,000 miles of shoreline in the spill region. -
The Kuwait Oil Fires
The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by Iraqi military forces setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number[quantify] of oil filled low-lying areas, such as oil lakes and fire trenches, as part of a scorched earth policy while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 due to the advances of Coalition military forces in the Persian Gulf War. The fires were started in January and February 1991, and the first well fires were extinguished in early April 1991, with the last well -
Jilin Chemical Plant Explosions
The Jilin chemical plant explosions were a series of explosions which occurred on November 13, 2005, in the No.101 Petrochemical Plant in Jilin City, Jilin Province, China, over the period of an hour. The explosions killed six, injured dozens, and caused the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents. The blasts created an 80 km long toxic slick in the Songhua River, a tributary of the Amur. The slick, predominantly made up of benzene and nitrobenzene, passed through the Amur River over subse -
TVA Kingston Fossil Plant Coal Fly Ash Slurry Spill
On December 22, 2008, a retention pond wall collapsed at Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Kingston plant in Harriman, Tennessee, releasing a combination of water and fly ash that flooded 12 homes, spilled into nearby Watts Bar Lake, contaminated the Emory River, and caused a train wreck. Officials said 4 to 6 feet of material escaped from the pond to cover an estimated 400 acres of adjacent land. A train bringing coal to the plant became stuck when it was unable to stop before reaching the flo -
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
The Great East Japan Earthquake of magnitude 9.0 at 2.46 pm on Friday 11 March 2011 did considerable damage in the region, and the large tsunami it created caused very much more. The earthquake was centred 130 km offshore the city of Sendai in Miyagi prefecture on the eastern cost of Honshu Island (the main part of Japan), and was a rare and complex double quake giving a severe duration of about 3 minutes. An area of the seafloor extending 650 km north-south moved typically 10-20 metres horizont -
Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch
The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N and 42°N.[1] The patch extends over an indeterminate area, with estimates ranging very widely depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area. The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debri.