Disaster films examined. Science or fiction?

Cinema has always found a constant inspiration in major natural disasters. Floods, storms, earthquakes, meteors ... There are many threats that Earth has to confront on the big screen.

However, it is not always easy to tell the difference between science and fiction. Do you want to know which of these films may come true? What is right and what is wrong? We are going to show you

ALERT: This gallery contains spoilers

Sources: National Geographic, Global Weather Oscillations, Government of California, Discover Magazine, Physics Special Topics, The Vane Magazine, New Scientist, Nasa, Channel 4, Environment Debate, Wired Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Climantica, Sciencie Fiction Magazine

In this film, perhaps one of the most spectacular in the past decade, a climatologist discovers the threat of an imminent and violent climate change due to global warming. In a race against time, with quickly frozen or flooded cities, he will try to save the world from a catastrophic fate.

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Although the main thesis of the film, which focuses on climate change due to human interaction, is real, a process like this could not happen in a span of a few days. It is not possible that on Monday everything is okay, with no extreme temperature changes, and on Wednesday an abandoned ship makes his way through the frozen water covering the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

In the Hollywood boom of disaster movies in early 70s –Airport, The Poseidon adventure, The towering inferno- director Mark Robson forced Los Angeles to deal with a big trouble: a 9.9 on the Ritcher scale earthquake that Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner had to face.

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The chance of earthquakes hitting the West Coast of the United States is well known. The San Andreas Fault, which runs through California, has already wreaked havoc of different magnitude in many parts of the state. Therefore, it is possible that a new earthquake occurs anytime, although reports have never recorded a greater earthquake than 8 points on the Richter scale since the magnitudes began to be recorded.

Maybe the most famous meteor film. Bruce Willis and their fierce group of oil extractors become heroes in order to save Earth from total destruction, an asteroid approaching our planet at great speed. His plan, destroy the rocky threat by dynamiting from whitin.

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Leaving aside the remote possibility that such a sized meteorite collides with the planet, what was clearly impossible in Michael Bay’s film was the chosen tactic to avoid the catastrophe. To split into two parts a fireball like that so that neither party had hit Earth, it would have taken a detonation of one hundred billion megatons, roughly as much energy as the sun releases.

A big revolution back in that time thanks to its innovative special effects, Twister followed the adventures of two groups of scientists competing each other for getting as close as possible to what they called "The finger of God", a violent storm that unleashed chaos within hours in Oklahoma.

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The scientific approach is, in general, very successful. It’s well known that tornadoes, more or less violent, are a constant in the American East and Middle East. However, to meet the demands of film footage, formation process, attack and dissolution of the "finger of God" happens in fewer hours than what they actually take in real life.

In the spectacular production of Roland Emmerich, who seems to have a weakness for large-scale natural disasters, we travelled at full speed from one corner of the world to another with John Cusack trying to escape from the devastating effects that magnetic pole reversal was provoking.

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The film is as impressive as impossible. And not because the magnetic pole reversal is science fiction. It occurs relatively frequently –geologically speaking-, so that 800,000 years ago a compass at the North Pole would have pointed to the South Pole and vice versa. And although there’s no way to calculate when the next investment will take place, NASA guarantees that, if it ever happens, it won’t involve the wild consequences of tsunamis, volcanoes retraining and collapsing buildings that we saw in the movie.

This British film, even though Robert Carlyle appears in it and it the spectacular images of London plunged into an amazing flood, it was launched directly for television in a miniseries format of two episodes. The premise is simple: strong storms, whose violence is greatly increased by global warming, threaten to turn the middle East of England, including its capital, in a sort of aquatic attraction.

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So possible that it has actually happened. Maybe not as shocking as in the film, but certainly with terrible consequences. The River Thames has had for many years a system of barriers that regulate the amount of water flowing through the city. Having into account the rainy weather of the British Isles, it is usual that the floodings overflow the river, causing floods that if they ever got the capital could be lethal. These barriers were lifted in 1953 after 300 people died.

Another film that made many distrust nature around them. We join Mark Wahlberg in his journey through a territory in which plants, tired of human abuse, decide to rebel spreading a lethal toxin that forces people to commit suicide.

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Assuming that plants lack human intelligence to tell who is attacking them or discriminate their agression to a unique group of living things, the fact is that some assumptions correspond to some biological behaviors: just like the microalgae that sometimes release toxins causing red tides to respond to a change in the environmental condition.

The 90s James Bond, Pierce Brosnan, got into the skin of a prestigious volcanologist who tried to alert a quiet American village about the imminent risk they were running. As it always happens, nobody paid any attention until it was too late when a sleeping volcano decided to wake up.

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The Dante’s Peak volcano eruption is very close to reality. The visual pyrotechnics and the devastation caused by the lava could well occur if such a giant woke up. However, the necessary cinematographic rhythm play tricks again, as the temperature rise of the waters near the volcano, when it occurs –and it doesn’t always occur- is very smooth: may require days or even weeks, not a few seconds, as in the film.

In a free interpretation of the classic Journey to the center of the Earth, Jon Amiel speculates that the core of the Earth has stopped, causing death, injury and eventually the tragic death for every living creature on the surface. The solution is getting to the heart of the planet to reactivate its rotation with detonations.

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The approach of the history disables any chance of hypotheses, because if the core of the Earth stopped detaining the rotation of the planet, every living thing on the surface would die on the spot. It is similar to what happens to a car moving at high speed and stops short when it hits a wall. Those who are not tied, will fly out.

Danny Boyle distanced himself from his previous films -Trainspotting, The beach- with a blockbuster. The plot revolves around the imminent end of the Solar System. Our sun will hopelessly expire within five years and there is nothing we can do.

Or almost nothing. Scientists propose to revive the star leading to it a huge explosive device made of all fissile materials from Earth.

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It’s already quite unlikely for the human race to get to see the extinction of the Sun, but aside from that fact, is still impossible to drive to center of the Solar System to provoke an explosive charge inside.