By Anna Claybourne. It's just over 100 pages long - and the layout is maybe 50% photos, maps and drawings.

The chapters are:

Volcanic Eruptions
Earthquakes
Cyclonic Storms
Tornadoes
Floods
Tsunamis
Limnic Eruptions
Landslides and Lahars
Snow and Ice
Wildfires
Lightning
Heatwaves and Droughts
Sinkholes
Solar and Impact Events

Three events caught my eye the most.

Two of them were droughts. One was the Northern Chinese drought which caused the famine of 1876-1879.

"Some resorted to eating grass, tree bark and soil...many caught deadly diseases, such as typhus. People also died fighting over food supplies. It's thought that the death toll from this famine was at least 13 million people."

Those details convinced me that Pearl S. Buck was referring to that famine in particular when she wrote "The Good Earth" (1931), since the book covers 50 years, and it's not clear just when it begins or ends. (Apologies if this is already well-known.)

Two pages later, we read about the "Mayan Mega-Drought."

"From about 800 C.E...the Maya began to build less, and their major cities declined...this could have been because of a mega-drought that lasted for several hundred years...cutting down trees to make space for their cities and farms probably made things worse, allowing the dry soil to blow away."

Which would explain why the cities were deserted and fell into ruin - somehow, I'd never heard of that possible cause before.

And the last event was the asteroid that was six miles across and made a crater 110 miles across "half in and half out of the ocean on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula."

This led to the K/T extinction - 66 million years ago, because "debris would have darkened the skies for years, leading to a food shortage that could have wiped out large animals."

(Yes, I know THAT one is pretty famous.)

More on that:

https://www.britannica.com/science/K-T-extinction

Also included:

The Storegga Slide (off the coast of Norway, in about 5,000 BCE)

This moved 840 cubic miles of rock and mud, caused a tsunami, and, she said, may have washed away "Doggerland," the marshland that connected part of Britain's east coast (but not the southern coast) to France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands.

St. Lucia's Flood (a storm surge in 1287 CE, in the Netherlands)

This killed 50,000 people, created the Zuiderzee (South Sea), which reached the village of Amsterdam, which, as a result, became the capital, as a port city.

Grote Mandrenke (Dutch for "great drowning of men" in 1362)

"It began as a huge storm that tore across northern Europe, blowing down trees and church spires in Ireland and England, before crossing the North Sea."

This made the Zuiderzee even bigger and created new islands in the area. The trading port of Rungholt was completely washed away. "According to folklore, when you sail over it, you can still hear the church bells ringing."

That reminded me of the 16th-century Dutch story of the rich woman of Stavoren, punished for her wastefulness - but oddly, another story places it in landlocked Czechia! Sometimes the story is called "The Most Precious Thing in the World."

https://www.worldfolklore.net/the-lady-of-stavoren/
(this has a photo of a STATUE of the "Lady of Stavoren")

https://ztevetevans.wordpress.com/2022/01/05/divine-retribution-three-doomed-cities-of-myth-and-legend/
(this also has a photo of the statue, but from a better angle - there are two other, unrelated stories)

More on legends of Rungholt:

https://frisiacoasttrail.blog/2020/10/09/rungholt/

And then there's this mermaid tale, from the late 16th century, when the All Saints' Flood occurred:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeftinghe_legend