the catastrophe matrix + more

Whenever I tackle a new subject I always have this weird urge to quantify and compare. And that usually means I want to draw something or find a visual way to express information.
Here are two early experiments.

The first figure is the 'Catastrophe Matrix' where I've assigned positions to various catastrophes. The axes I chose were death toll and um, presence in the mind of modern man, or notoriety I suppose. Obviously by reducing a catastrophe to a point on a graph I'm guilty of an almost blasphemous reduction (especially when I'm using words like 'big' and 'small'), and the positions have been assigned very recklessly - but I think it's part of starting to grapple with the subject (for me anyway).

The positions of different catastrophes necessarily change over time, but the thing that strikes me is how little death toll has to do with how much an event is recognised as a catastrophe (working with the idea of a catastrophe in a very literal way). It's as if there has to be an element of spectacle for us to acknowledge a catastrophe has taken place: we have to see the plane crashing into the towers, we have to imagine the largest ship in the world split in two, we need to be told that 'cathedral spires shook like reeds in the wind.' There's a terrible aesthetic threshold that needs to be crossed before we're really interested or engaged. If we want to use the idea of catastrophe being a blind spot then we could argue that the greatest catastrophes (malaria for example, or even modernity if we want to broaden the scope of the argument) are the ones that are most invisible, that are closest to the blind spot. Maybe we can't reckon with the catastrophe until it has some sort of aesthetic dimension?

The second diagram visualizes catastrophes in history as a kind of earthquake tremor diagram, similar to what we had in class. The epicentre, or point zero, is the point at which all life ends, and the proximity to that point is determined by how close we came to extinction (as a percentage of total population).