Catastrophe or catastrophic comes from the Greek κατά (''kata'') = down; στροφή (''strophē'') = turning (). It may refer to the following:

A general or specific event

Disaster A disaster is an event that causes serious harm to people, buildings, economies, or the environment, and the affected community cannot handle it alone. '' Natural disasters'' like avalanches, floods, earthquakes, and wildfires are caused by na ...

, a devastating event * The

Asia Minor Anatolia (), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean ...

Catastrophe, a Greek name for the 1923 Greek defeat at the

Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 was fought between Greece and the Turkish National Movement during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, between 15 May 1919 and 14 October 1922. This conflict was a par ...

and the

population exchange between Greece and Turkey The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involv ...

after the defeat *

The Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

, also known by the Hebrew name ''HaShoah'' which translates to "The Catastrophe" * The Chernobyl Catastrophe, a name of the 1986

Chernobyl disaster On 26 April 1986, the no. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near Pripyat, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Ukraine), exploded. With dozens of direct casualties, it is one of only ...

* Blue sky catastrophe, a type of bifurcation of a periodic orbit, where the orbit ''vanishes into the blue sky'' *

Catastrophic failure A catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure from which recovery is impossible. Catastrophic failures often lead to cascading systems failure. The term is most commonly used for structural failures, but has often been extended to many ot ...

, 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 * Ecological catastrophe, a disaster to the natural environment due to human activity * Error catastrophe, extinction of an organism as a result of excessive mutations * The

Ikiza The (variously translated from Kirundi as the Catastrophe, the Great Calamity, and the Scourge), or the (Killings), was a series of mass killings—often characterised as a genocide—which were committed in Burundi in 1972 by the Tutsi-domina ...

, which translates to the catastrophe from

Kirundi Kirundi (), also known as Rundi, is a Bantu language and the national language of Burundi. It is mutually intelligible with Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, and the two form parts of the Rwanda-Rundi dialect continuum spoken in Buru ...

* 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 The Late Bronze Age collapse was a period of societal collapse in the Mediterranean basin during the 12th century BC. It is thought to have affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, in particular Egypt, Anatolia, the Aegea ...

Malthusian catastrophe Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of tr ...

, prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth has outpaced agricultural production *

Mitotic catastrophe Mitotic catastrophe has been defined as either a cellular mechanism to prevent potentially cancerous cells from proliferating or as a mode of cellular death that occurs following improper cell cycle progression or entrance. Mitotic catastrophe can ...

, an event in which a cell is destroyed during mitosis * The

Nakba The Nakba () is the ethnic cleansing; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their s ...

in Arabic. *

Nedelin catastrophe The Nedelin catastrophe or Nedelin disaster, known in Russia as the Catastrophe at Baikonur Cosmodrome (), was a launch pad accident that occurred on 24 October 1960 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan. As a prototype of the R- ...

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 ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, was the prediction of late 19th century and early 20th century classical physics that an ideal black body at thermal equilibrium would emit an unbounded quantity of en ...

, 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

Art, entertainment, and media

Fictional entities

* Catastrophe, the main antagonist in '' The Secret Files of the Spy Dogs''

Film

* ''Catastrophe'' (film), a 1977 American documentary film * ''The Catastrophe'' (film), a 2011 American short film

Literature

* ''Catastrophe'' (Morris and McGann book), a 2009 non-fiction book by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann *

Catastrophe (drama) In drama, particularly the tragedies of classical antiquity, the ''catastrophe'' is the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. In comedies, this may be a marriage between main cha ...

, the climax and resolution of a plot in ancient Greek drama and poetry * ''Catastrophe'' (play), a 1982 short play by Samuel Beckett * '' Catastrophe: Risk and Response'', a 2004 non-fiction book by Richard Posner

Music

* Catastrophic (band), a band featuring Trevor Peres

Television

* ''Catastrophe'' (2008 TV series), a five-part science series on Channel 4, presented by Tony Robinson * ''Catastrophe'' (2015 TV series), a 2015 sitcom starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney

Mathematics

Catastrophe theory In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry. Bifurcation theory studies and classifies phenomena chara ...

, a theory by the French mathematician René Thom and the object of its study