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Panama Canal
From 1819, Panama was part of the federation and country of Colombia but when Colombia rejected United States plans to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the U.S. supported a revolution that led to the independence of Panama in 1903. -
Castle Bravo
The first of March 1954 marks one of the most serious nuclear fallout incidents in history. On this day, the United States conducted its largest ever nuclear weapon test, code-named Castle Bravo, at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Bravo was part of Operation Castle, a nuclear test series designed to develop an aircraft-deliverable thermonuclear weapon. Due to a design error, the explosion was 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. -
Minimata Disease
On April 21, 1956, a five year-old girl was examined at the Chisso Corporation's factory hospital in Minamata, Japan, a town on the west coast of the southern island of Kyūshū.
Minamata disease was first discovered in Minamata City in Kumamoto prefecture, Japan in 1956. It was caused by the release of methylmercury in the industrial wastewater (point source pollution) from the Chisso Corporation's chemical factory, which continued from 1932 to 1968. -
Aral Sea
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region’s two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops -
Silent Spring
Rachel was 56 and dying of breast cancer and there wasnt a perosn that knew about her sickness. -
Silent Spring
A year after this book was published Rachel Carson testified before a senate comittee on pesticides. -
Silent Spring
The Author Rachel Carson is considered Saint Rachel, “the nun of nature,” -
Tragedy of The Commons
Garett Hardin wrote the tragedy of the commons in 1963 and its basically how if the whole population relies on just one resource it will eventually be destroyed. -
Palomares Bombs
1966 two US Air Force planes collided and dropped four nuclear bombs near the village of Palomares in southern Spain. There was no nuclear blast, but plutonium was scattered over a wide area - and Spain is now asking the US to finish the clean-up. -
EPA
Consolidates in one agency a variety of federal research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities to ensure environmental protection. Since its inception, EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people. -
Door to Hell Discovery
In 1971, the Soviets were drilling and accidentally tapped into a natural gas tavern. -
seveso Disaster
In Europe, the Seveso accident in 1976 prompted the adoption of legislation aimed at the prevention and control of such accidents. The resulting 'Seveso' directive now applies to around 10,000 industrial establishments where dangerous substances are used or stored in large quantities, mainly in the chemicals, petrochemicals, storage, and metal refining sectors. -
Amoco Cadiz
The American owned supertanker, Amoco Cadiz, crashed off of the coast of Brittany, France on March 16, 1978.
Oil poured onto beaches and fishing grounds, creating what was predicted to turn into the worst tanker spill ever recorded.
On March 20, experts raced to salvage 29 million gallons of oil due to a bad weather forecast. Early estimates reported a pollution spread of about 130 kilometers. -
The Love Canal
In the 1920s the seeds of a genuine nightmare were planted. The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite. Landfills can of course be an environmentally acceptable method of hazardous waste disposal, assuming they are properly sited, managed, and regulated. Love Canal will always remain a perfect historical example of how not to run such an operation. In 1979 the canal exploded. -
Three Mile Island
In 1979 at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in USA a cooling malfunction caused part of the core to melt in the # 2 reactor. The TMI-2 reactor was destroyed. Some radioactive gas was released a couple of days after the accident, but not enough to cause any dose above background levels to local residents. -
Bhopal Disaster
Since 1984, 20,000 people lost their lives in Bhopal, India after a chemical gas spill from a pesticide factory. More than 40 tons of methyl isocyante (MIC) gas created a dense cloud over a resident population of more than half a million people. -
chernobyl
The April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyla nuclear power plant in Ukraine was the product of a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operatorsb. It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture. -
The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez had just entered Alaska's Prince William Sound, after departing the Valdez Marine Terminal full of crude oil. At 12:04 am, the ship struck a reef, tearing open the hull and releasing 11 million gallons of oil into the environment -
Kuwait Oil Fires
The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by Iraqi military forces setting fire to 700 oil wells as part of a scorched earth policy while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 after conquering the country but being driven out by Coalition military forces (see Gulf War). The fires started in January and February 1991 and the last one was extinguished by November 1991. -
Libby, Montana Asbestos Contamination
The Libby, Montana community and its residents are facing a critical environmental and public health crisis caused by the slow motion technological disaster of asbestos exposure -
Baia Mare Gold Mine
On January 30th 2000, the dam containing toxic waste material from the Baia Mare Aurul gold mine in North Western Romania burst and released 100,000 cubic meters of waste water, heavily contaminated with cyanide, into the Lapus and Somes tributaries of the river Tisza, one of the biggest in Hungary. -
Sulfur Fire
A fire that ignited in June 2003 at the Mishraq State Sulfur Mine Plant near Mosul, Iraq burned for almost a month. Field samples of air in the vicinity of the fire detected sulfur dioxide at levels immediately dangerous to health and life. Hydrogen sulfide also was released. Exposure varied by wind and fire conditions over time. -
Sidoarjo Mud Flow disaster
On May 28, 2006, PT Lapindo Brantas targeted gas by drilling a borehole named the 'Banjar-Panji 1 exploration well'. In the first stage of drilling the drill string first went through a thick clay seam, volcanic debris and finally into permeable carbonate rocks. At this stage the borehole was surrounded by a steel casing to help stabilize it. At 5:00 a.m. local time a second stage of drilling began and the drill string went deeper. -
"An Inconvientient Truth"
This is a film made by Al Gore about global warming. -
TVA Kingston Fossil Plant Coal Ash 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. -
Door to Hell
In April 2010 the country's president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, visited the site and ordered that the hole should be closed but this is yet to happen. -
Jilin Chemical Plant Explosions
July 28, heavy rainstorms triggered panic throughout Jilin after over 7,000 barrels of chemicals were washed into the river. -
BP Oil Spill
The Gulf oil spill is recognized as the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Within days of the April 20, 2010 explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people, underwater cameras revealed the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana. By the time the well was capped on July 15, 2010 (87 days later), an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had leaked into the Gulf. -
Fukushima Daiichi
After a large earthquake a 15 meter tsunami occurred. the tsunami disabled thepower supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident on March, 11th 2011. All three cores largely melted in the first three days. -
Three Gorges
The Three Gorges Dam is a model for disaster, yet Chinese companies are replicating this model both domestically and internationally. Within China, huge hydropower cascades have been proposed and are being constructed in some of China’s most pristine and biologically and culturally diverse river basins - the Lancang (Upper Mekong) River, Nu (Salween) River and upstream of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River and tributari -
E-Waste
Much of the toxic pollution comes from burning circuit boards, plastic and copper wires, or washing them with hydrochloric acid to recover valuable metals like copper and steel -
Door to Hell
The Door to Hell has a diameter of 70 meters. -
Door to Hell
The Door to hell can be seen from a village of 250 people. -
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in oceans, seas, and other large bodies of water. -
Smog of 1952
A fog so thick and polluted it left thousands dead wreaked havoc on London in 1952. The smoke-like pollution was so toxic it was even reported to have choked cows to death in the fields -
First Earth day
The height of hippie and flower-child culture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Protest was the order of the day, but saving the planet was not the cause. War raged in Vietnam, and students nationwide increasingly opposed it. -
Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone
The Gulf of Mexico's annual spring-summer "dead zone" is the size of Connecticut -- slightly smaller now than in recent years but nowhere near the trim scientists had sought,
