Jan Asselijn's (1610-1652) oil on canvas painting The Breach of the Saint Anthony's Dike near Amsterdam focuses on the disastrous storm tide that struck the Dutch coast in March 1651. The ocean's onslaught broke St. Anthony's Dike near Amsterdam. Note the two figures in the foreground shrinking back from the gushing water and the raging wind.

The above painting captures the scene after a gunpowder store in the Dutch city of Delft exploded, completely destroying a quarter of the city and killing thousands of people. The event was known as the "The Delft Thunderclap." Craters, burnt trees and roofless houses can be seen in Van der Poel's painting. The artist completed 20 canvases of the disaster, always from the same perspective.

Traveling in Italy in November 1774, British artist Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) witnessed an eruption of the Mount Vesuvius near the city of Naples. The event captured his fascination, and he created about 30 paintings documenting volcanic eruptions over the next 20 years.

French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819) was also fascinated by Mount Vesuvius. He painted the volcano's historic eruption in the year 79 A.D. In the foreground, two figures support a dying man, the Roman officer and naturalist Pliny the Elder. The collapsing buildings and billowing smoke with the still raging volcano in the background create an apocalyptic scene.

From 1820 to 1821, German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) experienced a harsh winter on the Elbe River, where he witnessed floes — large sheets of floating ice. He made several drawings of the rare natural phenomenon. The Sea of Ice is the foremost work from that series. The ice floes are so monumental that the shipwreck on the right is not immediately noticeable.

The above late work, also by Caspar David Friedrich, is entitled Neubrandenburg in Flames and shows a city burning, with smoke billowing from the church. Friedrich is perhaps referring to Neubrandenburg city fires that took place before his time, in 1631,1676 and 1737.

Another fire: Jacob Gensler's (1808-1845) "Hamburg after the Fire of 1842" is regarded as a key artwork depicting the devastating fire in the northern German port city. Ruins and smoke dominate in the background, as men in the foreground are already at work rebuilding the city.

The emigrant ship Austria sank in the Atlantic after a fire broke out on its passage from Hamburg to New York. Only 89 of 545 passengers survived the disaster. German-Austrian artist Johann Carl Berthold Püttner (1821-1881) portrayed the catastrophe in his painting made the same year.

Many years after the maritime disaster, French artist Eugene Isabey (1803-1886) chose a huge canvas (2 x 3.4 meters; 6.5 by 11 feet) to paint the 1823 sinking of a three-master. The sailors can barely stay above the waves in the raging storm that also makes it impossible to lower the lifeboats. The interplay between massive dark waves and angry black clouds is one of the painting's key elements.

Floods are just as disastrous today as they were centuries ago. German multimedia artist Kota Ezawa's (born 1969) computer-animated work 'Flood, 2011' is based on a newspaper photograph of flooding in Georgia, USA. He uses vector graphics, computer-graphic images defined in terms of 2D points, to create a technical picture.

The above work by Portuguese-born visual artist Olphaert den Otter (born 1955) is part of his World Stress Painting series that highlights the daily glut of photos from disaster areas in the media. The artist, who lives in the Netherlands, keeps on adding to his "never-ending series" which he refers to as a "catalogue of beauty without well-being."

Earth observation satellites such as the European Space Agency's Proba-V collect daily images that allow for the tracking of environmental changes over time. The images above - taken in April 2014, July 2015 and January 2016 (left to right) - offer crystal-clear insight into the gradual evaporation of Lake Poopo, once Bolivia's second largest lake - due at least in part to climate change.

No matter how long volcanoes sleep, they're always in a bad mood when they wake up. The International Space Station was passing overhead when the Sarychev volcano, located in the Kuril Islands of Russia, erupted in 2009. Astronauts were able to snap a picture through a hole in the clouds. From dense ash to clouds of condensed water, virtually all natural phenomena can be examined from outer space.

Every year, wildfires devastate the landscape - and ecology - in numerous countries around the world. Too often, these are caused by humans. This was also the case in Indonesia, where farmers burned peat rainforest areas for agriculture. On the island of Borneo and Sumatra, satellites detected fire hot spots in September 2015, and the plume of grey smoke that triggered air quality alerts.

In Germany, parents warn their children that if they don't finish their meals, it's going to rain. And indeed, in 2013 it rained, so much that some of central Europe's major rivers overflowed their banks. As shown in this image from 2013, the Elbe burst its banks following unprecedented rainfall. In the photo, muddy water covers the area around Wittenberg, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

A strong storm can cause irreparable damage through intense winds and storm surges from the sea. Space-based information is crucial in following development of such storms: intensity, the direction it's moving, wind speed … in the eastern Pacific Ocean near Mexico, this satellite image helped determine how tropical storm Sandra reached winds of 160 kilometers per hour by November 25, 2015.

Satellites also play a key role in monitoring climate change and, inevitably, the process of melting ice. From space, scientists were able to document how several glaciers around the globe have receded - as well as the subsequent rise in sea level. This photograph, taken from the International Space Station, shows the retreat of the Upsala glacier in Argentine Patagonia from 2002 to 2013.

Dust often covers remote deserts - however, in September 2015, satellites offered this impressive view of Middle East areas enveloped by a dust storm, or haboob, affecting large populated regions. What satellites can observe from space supports air quality sensors on the ground to understand patterns on how the storms start and develop. These findings can improve forecasting methods.

These are the words NASA used to describe the lack of snow on California's Mount Shasta, a crucial source of water for the region. Images documenting drought over the past years have consistently been showing brown mountains that should be white, and bare earth where people seek water. As ice melts, drought grows.