Our database
Many of nature’s processes are chaotic, some easier to predict. The spring flood is easy to prognosticate because of a one-year rhythm, the somewhat longer sunspot cycle is also well known, total solar eclipses are rare but may be predicted even more precisely than the ebb and flood. Some volcanoes erupt every 75-80 years, others every 250 years, depending on the size of their magma chambers. Some volcanoes have magma chambers that it takes about a thousand years to fill. So if we want to understand and use nature’s cycles to make forecasts for the future, we need long series of observations.
In our consulting work our strongest tool is the unique database TRITON, which contains records of natural disasters and other natural phenomena that have occurred throughout all of human history. Since many institutions, organisations and insurance companies have begun building their own catalogues of natural disasters in recent time, we have chosen to focus our research on natural disasters before 1900. However, TRITON contains information on events after 1900 as well, since information on these is readily available, and since our goal is to establish long time series we have chosen to collect data covering the past 5 million years.
TRITON today contains information and quotes from more than 7900 publications in 22 languages, the result of a review of more than 44,300 publications and 61,400 archive-pages. Every event in the database is detailed by a bibliographic reference.