page_title: Natural disaster
section_title: Sinkholes
hierarchical_section_title: Natural disaster / Geological disasters / Sinkholes
caption_attribution_description: The Red Lake in Croatia, near the city of Imotski.
context_page_description: A natural disaster is a major adverse event resulting from natural processes of the Earth; examples are floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, and other geologic processes. A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property, and typically leaves some economic damage in its wake, the severity of which depends on the affected population's resilience and also on the infrastructure available.
  An adverse event will not rise to the level of a disaster if it occurs in an area without vulnerable population. In a vulnerable area, however, such as Nepal during the 2015 earthquake, an earthquake can have disastrous consequences and leave lasting damage, which can require years to repair.
  Societies are becoming significantly less vulnerable to extreme weather events. The death toll from natural disasters has declined over 90 percent since the 1920s, according to the International Disaster Database, even as the total human population on Earth quadrupled, and temperatures rose 1.3 degrees centigrade. In the 1920s, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters while in the 2010s, just 400,000 did.
context_section_description: When natural erosion, human mining or underground excavation makes the ground too weak to support the structures built on it, the ground can collapse and produce a sinkhole. For example, the 2010 Guatemala City sinkhole, which killed fifteen people, was caused when heavy rain from Tropical Storm Agatha, diverted by leaking pipes into a pumice bedrock, led to the sudden collapse of the ground beneath a factory building.
caption: The Red Lake in Croatia
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