The Upheaval

The Upheaval
The Upheaval, known in other cultures as The Destruction or The Cataclysmic Pole-Shift is the name given to the chain of events that reshaped the modern world. Every natural disaster possible struck the planet in a way people could only describe as unnatural. Tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes ripped entire countries in half as tectonic plates shifted, drastically altering the geography of the planet. This event occured for a year and by the end of it, civilisation was left picking up the pieces. From that point on, the world calendar reset, deeming the time the year 0000 ATU. All mankind could do was adapt to the new world. Certain countries had been irreversibly damaged while others were able to begin the recovery effort. New nations were formed out of the broken pieces of other continents and cultures began to meld. While most of the world recovered and established contact, many parts of the world are situated in places where the storms and earthquakes never settled, making intercontinental travel nearly impossible. Contact with such parts of the world is practically impossible and the fate of the nations trapped in such zones is unknown.

Affected Continents
African Subcontinents Asian Isles European Archipelagos
 * African was essentially split into three continents
 * Asia was split into two major continents, but a lot of the landmass was consumed by chaos storms
 * Europe became a set of multicultural island chains governed by the city state of london

Changes to the calendar
The events of the Upheaval were so devastating and fundamentally world changing that it caused the human race to reset the world calendar. The BC and AD terms were kept for historical puposes, but from that point on, mankind refered to events before the upheaval as BTU (Before The Upheaval) and events after the Upheaval as ATU (After The Upheaval).