Watched the Netflix documentary Earthstorm, in four parts: Tornado, Volcano, Earthquake, and Hurricane, each part running less than an hour.

Tornado features twister chasers across plains and the American south in 2021 and the tornado that swept across Kentucky in 2022. It includes explanations by meteorologists about how a tornado is formed.

Volcano shows the eruptions of Fagradalsfjall in Iceland, Cumbre Vieja of the Canary Islands, Masaya and Fuego of Nicaragua, and Campi Flegrei in Italy. There is brief mention of the eruptions of Vesuvius in Naples, Yellowstone in the U.S.A., Mount Toba in Indonesia, Taupo in New Zealand, and Baiae, in Rome. Scientists explain why, although volcanoes are dangerous and lethal, they are also beneficial to the earth.

Earthquake focuses on tsunami in Japan, the devastating quakes in Northridge, California in 1974, California's biggest earthquake in 1906, and the earthquakes and tsunami in Tohoku, Japan in 2011. Other places in Japan that are mentioned are Rikuzentakata, Sendai City, Kamaishi, Otsuchi. Seismologists and firefighters are among those interviewed.

It is interesting that Japan has a record of tsunamis stretching back over a thousand years. It is mentioned in Morioka Domain's Book of Miscellaneous Subjects that one tsunami "doesn't fit the mold," that in Kuwagasaki on  midnight of January 27, 1700, in which 20 houses burned down and 13 were washed away--an "orphan tsunami" because there was no record of an earthquake at the time. The documentary poses a hypothesis: if the massive earthquake that occurred in  Chile in 1960 was able to cross the Pacific and reach Japan, couldn't a similar earthquake elsewhere have caused the orphan tsunami in Kuwagasaki in 1700?

The documentarians turn to both ancient legend and science for an answer. In the Pacific Northwest, a North American legend of the Quinault people tell of the the Thunderbird Xanissah, who would fly over the sea, pick up the biggest whale, take it as high as the mountaintops, then drop it. The whale would hit the ground so hard that it would shake the earth. We are also shown how scientists in the Copalis Ghost Forest, in Washington, are able to search for evidence and telltale signs among the long-dead trees, inspecting their rings and determining that their final ring was in 1699 and stopped growing in 1700, indicating that a huge earthquake occurred there the same year as the Kuwagasaki earthquake. 

The third part ends with how analysis of sediment can trace the patterns of earthquakes, such as those that occurred within the Cascadia Fault.

Hurricane shows the work of storm chasers and storm journalists, particularly during Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 that swept the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in 2021. There is reference to Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5, which tore into Louisiana in  August 2005. There is also  mention of Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in 2013. We are informed that hurricanes are called cyclones in the region of the Indian Sea and typhoons in Asia.

On the whole, it seems that the documentary is meant as a wake-up call for everyone to heed the warning signs of climate change, although the ultimate conflict we seem to be facing is not only man against Nature also but man against fellow man.