disaster

A June 1986 CNN interview with physicist Richard Feynman about the Challenger disaster and the management failures he found while serving on the investigating commission.

A clip of the Yes Men posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman on the BBC and announcing compensation for victims of the Bhopal disaster, a hoax on live television.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

CityNerd's Ray Delahanty tallies the personal costs of driving and then the externalities that car dependency imposes on everyone else, with numbers for each. It is an urbanist case that driving is heavily subsidized and costs society far more than drivers pay.

Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the village of Garavadi in Maharashtra, India, which took part in the Paani Foundation's Water Cup competition. It shows the water harvesting structures the villagers built in 45 days and how they restored groundwater and the local economy.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths asks whether a country's reported land area accounts for hills and mountains, working through how surface area depends on the resolution of elevation data. It follows up on a question from a viewer and work by researchers who measured it.

Curious Droid asks what traces human civilization would leave in the geological record 65 million years from now. It considers how thin the fossil record of humanity might be.

Practical Engineering explains what a 100-year flood actually means, combining statistics, hydrology and how society treats risk. Grady walks through local drainage infrastructure and the caveats in estimating flood probability.

Tom Scott visits Onkalo in Finland, the planned deep geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste intended to be sealed for 100,000 years.

A short documentary about the 1980 Lake Peigneur accident in Louisiana, where an oil rig drilled into a salt mine beneath the lake. The lake drained into the mine, creating a whirlpool that swallowed barges.

Practical Engineering explains why San Francisco's Millennium Tower is sinking and tilting, covering how geology and foundation design (friction piles in the Colma Formation) affect skyscrapers. It also covers the fix being attempted.

Kurzgesagt asks whether advanced civilizations could have existed on Earth in the deep past and left little evidence. It looks at time as a dimension for searching for alien civilizations and the limits of the geological record.

Tom Scott explains how decades of deep coal mining sank parts of Germany's Ruhr Valley and changed its drainage. Pumps run by Emschergenossenschaft must now work permanently to keep towns and cities from flooding.

Al Baydha project co-founder Neal Spackman gives a final update nine years in, explaining how desertification followed the loss of indigenous land management and how the land has changed since inputs stopped in 2016. It lists which species worked best.

A Discovery Channel computer simulation of a large asteroid impact on Earth, showing the scale of the devastation. It sits in a broader context of early Earth impacts and the moon-forming collision.

Excerpts from Nick Breeze's 2012 interview with researcher Natalia Shakhova about methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. She discusses the risk of abrupt methane emissions.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the tension between public and private weather forecasting, including NOAA data and AccuWeather's lobbying against free public weather data.

Veritasium shows an experiment from Prof. Dan Lathrop's lab with a spinning sphere of molten sodium, used to study how turbulent convection in Earth's core generates a magnetic field. It is a short demonstration of dynamo physics.

NFPA video in which wildfire researcher Jack Cohen explains that embers (firebrands), not the flame front, are the main cause of homes igniting in wildfires. He shows how landscaping and removing debris around the home reduce risk.

The US Chemical Safety Board's updated animation of the 2005 BP Texas City refinery explosion, which killed 15 workers. It was released ahead of a process safety training application.