Floods, Droughts, and Hydrological Disasters
A survey of the world's major flood- and drought-prone regions, the hydrological forces that drive them, and the historic disasters, land-management failures, and infrastructure responses they have produced.
60-Second Review
Express reviewA condensed, point-by-point summary of the module, for reviewing right before a test or exam.
- River Flooding and Floodplain Geography. Rivers periodically overtop their banks onto floodplains built by the very sediment they deposit.
- Flash Floods and Urban Flood Risk. Flash floods strike within hours of intense rain, and urbanization sharply worsens the hazard.
- Major Historic Floods and Their Toll. History's deadliest floods, led by China's 1931 disaster, reveal flooding as humanity's costliest hazard.
- Drought Mechanisms and Megadrought Regions. Droughts arise from distinct meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural mechanisms across arid regions.
- The Dust Bowl and Lessons in Land Management. Poor tillage and drought combined in the 1930s to strip the U.S. Great Plains of its topsoil.
- Famine and Drought-Driven Displacement. Drought becomes famine chiefly through political failure and conflict, not rainfall deficit alone.
- Dam Failures and Engineered Flood Risk. Dam failures convert engineered flood control into sudden catastrophic flooding when structures fail.
- Flood Control Infrastructure Around the World. From Dutch storm barriers to Chinese sponge cities, nations engineer diverse defenses against flooding.
This module continues after "Tropical Cyclones and Severe Storm Geography" in the syllabus. If you haven't reviewed it yet, it may help set the context.
Key points
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Final test
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Optional mini-games
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Further reading
Bibliography and cited sources used to create this module.
- Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Worster, D. (1979). Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press.
- McCullough, D. (1968). The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- de Waal, A. (1991). Evil Days: Thirty Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia. New York: Human Rights Watch.
- Gregory, J.N. (1989). American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Williams, A.P., Cook, B.I., and Smerdon, J.E. (2020). "Large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging North American megadrought." Science, 368(6488), 314–318.