Look up catastrophe in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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

A general or specific event

• Disaster, a devastating event
• 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 Holocaust, also known by the Hebrew name HaShoah which translates to "The Catastrophe"
• 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
• 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, which translates to the catastrophe from Kirundi
• 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 in Arabic.
• 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

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 (book), a 2009 non-fiction book by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
• Catastrophe (drama), 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, a theory by the French mathematician René Thom and the object of its study