Catastrophe or catastrophic comes from the Greek κατά (kata) = down; στροφή (strophē) = turning

(Greek: καταστροφή). It may refer to:

Contents

 1A general or specific event

 2Art, entertainment, and media
o 2.1Fictional entities
o 2.2Literature
o 2.3Music
o 2.4Television
 3Mathematics
 4See also

A general or specific event[edit]

 Disaster
 The Asia Minor Catastrophe, a Greek name for the 1923 Greek defeat at the Greco-Turkish War
(1919–1922) and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey after the defeat
 The Chernobyl Catastrophe, a name of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster
 Blue sky catastrophe, a type of bifurcation of a periodic orbit, where the orbit vanishes into the
blue sky
 Catastrophic failure, complete failure of a system from which recovery is impossible (e.g. a
bridge collapses)
 Climatic catastrophe, forced transition of climate system to a new climate state at a rate which is
more rapid than the rate of change of the external forcing
 Cosmic catastrophe, thought experiment about what would happen if the sun were to suddenly
disappear
 Ecological catastrophe, a disaster to the natural environment due to human activity
 Error catastrophe, extinction of an organism as a result of excessive mutations
 Impending climatic catastrophe, conjectured runaway climate change resulting from a rise in the
average temperature of the Earth's climate system
 Infrared catastrophe or infrared divergence is a situation in particle physics in which a particular
integral diverges
 Iron catastrophe, runaway melting of early earth's interior as a result of potential energy release
from sinking iron and nickel melted by heat of radioactive decay
 Late Bronze Age collapse
 Malthusian catastrophe, prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once
population growth has outpaced agricultural production
 Mitotic catastrophe, an event in which a cell is destroyed during mitosis
 The Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homes
 Nedelin catastrophe or Nedelin disaster, launch pad accident at Baikonur test range of Baikonur
Cosmodrome
 Oxygen catastrophe, the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen (O2) in Earth's
atmosphere
 Runaway climate change or Climatic catastrophe, hypothesized runaway global warming when a
tipping point is exceeded
 Toba catastrophe hypothesis, hypothesis that the Toba supervolcanic eruption caused a global
volcanic winter and 1,000-year-long cooling episode
 Ultraviolet catastrophe, the prediction by classical physics that a black body will emit radiation at
infinite power
 Vacuum catastrophe, the discrepancy between theoretical and measured vacuum energy
density in cosmology