When a truly devastating cataclysm hits a world — a nuclear war, a meteor strike, some form of climactic upheaval — one way that people try to weather the storm is by digging in, and digging in deep.
Heading underground is a relatively common way that fictional societies try to deal with large-scale apocalypses, and the reasoning isn't too difficult to parse. Having a mile or three of solid rock between yourself and whatever was causing you trouble is certainly up there in protective strategies, and is especially effective for dealing with issues such as extreme temperatures, toxic atmospheres, or deadly radiation that artificial barriers can struggle to block out. If you're good enough at covering your tracks and plugging up the entrance hole, it can also be a very effective way of avoiding the attention of hostile factions or dangerous monsters.
The exact mechanics of these exoduses vary, but most will involve either digging extremely deep bunkers or heading down into a preexisting cavern system. In fantasy works, at least some of the races living in a Fantastic Underworld may have wound up down there this way, growing in size over time until they become an Underground City.
See also Rocky Mountain Refuge, for when the United States survives a calamity by hiding out in the Rockies, which can overlap when it does so by digging bunkers into the mountains, and Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter, for when people make a desperate last-minute scramble for the shelter as the apocalypse starts.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
See Also
Birds of Guernsey (1879)
And the Neighbouring Islands: Alderney, Sark, Jethou, Herm; Being a Small Contribution to the Ornitholony of the Channel IslandsI Have the Alchemy Emperor in My Head - Chapter 2366: The King Stage Cannot Be Humiliated Free Read Online- Cowboy Bebop: After the Gate accident that destroyed part of the moon in the series' backstory, the survivors of the catastrophe that didn't flee to the other parts of the Solar System instead dug vast underground shelters to protect themselves from the constant bombardment of moon rocks. By the time the series has started, things have quieted down enough that some people have returned to living on the surface.
- Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger: The Mykene are a civilization that lived and thrived in the Greek island of Bardos millennia ago, but an earthquake destroyed their island and forced them to seek shelter underground. They lived below the Earth for millennia, building their cities in networks of subterranean tunnels and caverns and grafting their bodies into Humongous Mecha to survive.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
- At the beginning, humanity ekes out a meager existence inside underground villages, hiding from beastmen who rule the surface and kill humans on sight. After the beastmen are defeated, it eventually comes out that the villages played another role in sheltering humanity by limiting the population through scarcity of resources. Before the series began, humanity lost a genocidal war against the Anti-Spiral, but it agreed not to completely exterminate the species so long as the population remained below one million.
- After the human population reaches one million, the Anti-Spiral triggers the moon to impact into Earth as a countermeasure. While the government prepared for this scenario and built an ark to take most of the population off the planet, the remaining few thousands are told to head back to their underground villages and just hope for the best.
Fan Works
- Antipodes: Ten millennia in the past, the Princesses' disappearance left the sun and moon locked permanently in the sky, turning half of the world into a frozen waste and the other into a barren desert. Those who were left stranded outside of the twilight zone, where the surface eventually became wholly uninhabitable, survived by going underground and hiding in vast bunkers shielded from the extreme elements.
Film — Live-Action
- Beneath the Planet of the Apes: The humans who escaped the fall of civilization thousands of years in the past retreated to the buried New York City. Due to living next to a giant nuclear warhead, they have become telepathic mutants by the time Taylor and the rest arrive.
- Blast from the Past starts with the Webber family — psychiatrist Dr. Calvin Webber and his pregnant wife Helen — moving into an elaborate fallout shelter that Calvin built below their suburban home and filled with thirty-five years' worth of supplies. This is in 1962 in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and shortly after they move a plane crashes on their home blocking off communications with the rest of the world. Thirty-five years later in 1997, their son Adam ventures out in search of food to replenish their dwindling stocks and instead discovers... normal late 1990s American inner-city life instead.
- Day of the Dead (1985) follows a group of survivors hunkered down in Ye Olde Nuclear Silo during the Zombie Apocalypse.
- Deep Impact: Once it has been determined that the comet will likely come to Earth, plans were made to save a percentage of the population based on need and random selection in the cave network of Missouri, called "The Ark"
- Downsizing: Dr. Asbjørnsen reveals to Paul that due to climate change and not enough people choosing to downsize, humanity will soon become extinct. He enacts a contingency plan: he and the other colonists will enter a large underground vault, and their descendants will emerge when the surface environment stabilizes in 8,000 years. Paul's friend Dusan is unimpressed, comparing the plan to starting a cult and saying in a few years the colonists "will eat each other."
- Dr. Strangelove: Discussed and parodied in the "End Is Nigh" Ending as the Cold War escalates to nuclear Armageddon. The US cabinet starts to discuss how humanity could survive in refitted mines for a century but gloss over the logistical Cold Equations and fixate on harem demographics and outcompeting the Russians.
Dr. Strangelove: I would not rule out a chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy... [Dissonant Laughter] ...at the bottom of, ah, some of our deeper mine shafts.
- Embers: In order to escape the unnamed, memory-erasing virus, Miranda and her father have retreated to an Elaborate Underground Base with filtered air. Miranda eventually decides to head to the surface at the end of the film.
- Greenland: The plot revolves around the Garritys' struggle to reach a secret underground bunker that the U.S. government made in Greenland in case the giant asteroid approached the planet. The Garritys were selected to be part of the bunker refugees to begin with but were kicked out at the last second before boarding the plane because they did not accept people with certain diseases, such as their son's diabetes.
- The Matrix: Zion, humanity's last refuge from the machines, lies deep underground so as to avoid the effects of the poisonous atmosphere.
- Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: At the end, it is revealed that Crystal Peak, where John and Kate had been heading thinking that it was the core of Skynet where they could stop the oncoming nuclear apocalypse, is actually a military underground bunker. As Skynet starts launching the first missiles against mankind, emergency calls start pouring in and John and Kate realise that the T-850 Terminator that has been protecting them the entire film was always intending to lead them to a safe refuge to help humanity fight back against the apocalypse rather than avert it.
- The Time Machine: In a case of Adaptational Backstory Change, the film adaptations portray the Morlocks as being descended from humans who fled underground to escape a calamity. The calamity in question is World War III in the 1960 version and the moon blowing up in the 2002 version.
Literature
- Ash 2001: Humanity's only extrasolar colony is nuked in The War of Earthly Aggression, resulting in survivors hiding in an underground city built just prior to the destruction. Other survivors live in a base under the ocean. Earth forces have no idea anyone survived but continue to nuke the surface. The underground survivors are building nukes to retaliate against the enemy base.
- Robert Silverberg's At Winter's End and The Queen of Springtime has humanity emerge from their millenias-long sojourn underground as the global ice age begins to recede.
- The Books of Ember: Ember is a city built within a huge underground cavern to protect a core of survivors from an unspecified apocalypse. Over time, the settlers forgot about their origin or the nature of their home and came to believe that they had always lived in a world of endless darkness lit only by their electric generator. As a result, they've been overstaying in their sanctuary for decades beyond the point they were supposed to return to the surface; the generator is beginning to break down, their food supplies are beginning to run out, and a box containing instructions for safely leaving the city, passed down from mayor to mayor, has been lost.
- Bran Mak Morn: In "The Lost Race", the Picts set up a new society underground after being driven from their land by waves of invaders.
- The Butter Battle Book: When the Yooks' scientists come up with the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, the Yook commander sends the civilians into an underground bunker for safety. The only exceptions are the protagonist (who has to drop the weapon on the Zooks) and his grandson, who wasn't supposed to be up there but came anyway.
- The Compound: The plot centers around a wealthy family living underground in a high-tech compound after nuclear strikes. Sadly, two family members — the grandmother, and the protagonist's twin brother — never made it down. It then turns out that the nukes never fell at all, and the family have been living underground battling things like tainted grain and Sanity Slippage simply because the father wanted to do an experiment.
- The Genocides: The citizens of Tassel flee the destruction of their town during the alien invasion and hide within the hollow roots of a plant beneath a cave for several months.
- The Laundry Files: In The Nightmare Stacks, the Host of Air and Darkness are a battalion of alfar soldiers whose home Earth experienced the occult equivalent of a nuclear war. They survived by being on the fringes of their empire to begin with and sealing themselves inside an Elaborate Underground Base to avoid the horrors now running rampant on the surface, where they hoped to wait out the apocalypse in suspended animation, but dwindling resources eventually forced them to attempt to invade our Earth.
- The Lost Metal: Played with. Marasi discovers a fake town set up in an underground cavern, called Wayfarer. The people living there believe that the Ashmounts began erupting again making the surface inhospitable and mutating people exposed to the ash, and that they're the only survivors since they were brought to this bunker in time. In reality, it's all a ploy by the Set to keep a large number of Allomancers under their control for use in hemalurgic experiments. To sell the illusion they occasionally release hemalurgic monsters as mutants that "broke in", and they have an aboveground observation room set up with a projected image of the supposedly devastated surface (really a video of a miniature apocalyptic scene), which the residents believe is a window to the real outside world. However, Telsin and Entrone do intend to use the town as an actual bunker for Set loyalists should Autonomy begin an invasion of Scadrial.
- Metro: All of the stations in the Moscow Metro have been converted, following the nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks on the city, into permanent underground cities, complete with houses, shops, military bases, communications centers, and hospitals. Metro Exodus also reveals that the city of Novosibirsk also converted its Metro stations into underground settlements. Unfortunately, thanks to a deadly Civil War between these stations, almost the entire populace had been wiped out, leaving them a virtual Ghost Town.
- Seveneves has humanity hedging their bets after an apocalypse: some go to space, and some move underground to escape the bombardment.
- The short story "Eleven Hours Out" in the Star Trek Novel 'Verse Tales of The Dominion War states that Starfleet Command maintains an underground bunker below their San Francisco HQ that can be used as an emergency operations center, protected by starbase-grade deflector shielding and a couple miles of bedrock. Picard, Troi, and a group of newly-minted ensigns use the bunker to rally the defense of Earth during the Breen attack.
- The War of the Worlds (1898): Discussed when the artilleryman briefly involves the hero in a plan to form an underground resistance movement against the Martians based in the London sewers (which, he says, would be swept clean by the rain once they've fallen into disuse), using tunnels connected to cellars throughout the city. Nothing, besides a single half-dug trench, actually comes of his plan.
- The Wump World: When the Pollutians arrive, the wumps hide in caves, going deeper and deeper to escape the growing noise and pollution and living off of fungi as the Pollutians spread over and despoil the surface world.
Live-Action TV
- The 100 is set 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse devastated Earth. Mount Weather is a community of 300 to 400 people living in an underground bunker designed to weather this sort of disaster. It's implied it was built by the United States military for the event of a nuclear war.
- Aftermath: The humans are eventually driven to live underground due to the levels of radiation and heat. Most of them die out when Earth's surface temperature reaches 371 °C, as the internal heat from Earth's mantle prevents them from going low enough to escape the heat from the surface. As such, they escape into space.
- Bones: "The Doom in the Gloom": Discussed and deconstructed. The team investigates a group of doomsday preppers who live in an underground bunker when one of them is found murdered. The team comment on the Insane Troll Logic of the preppers and the many downsides to bunker life, including syphilis, poor wound care, and infighting amongst the small, sequestered group. This ends up being what killed the victim — the wife of the man she had an affair with got a bit jealous and set a booby trap that killed her while in a locked room, justifying that it was for the good of the group's survival.
- Doctor Who: "The Enemy of the World" features a community of people who have been living in an underground bunker for years following an apocalypse. What they don't know is that the apocalypse never happened, and their leader has been lying to them for his own purposes.
- Not the Nine O'Clock News: In the "Question Time" sketch when the panel is discussing an explosion that is going to wipe them out any moment now, one of the panel mentions that while they are in a comfortable studio, the average trade unionist is down a coal mine. Sir Robin Day quips that that's precisely where he'd like to be right now.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Silicon Avatar": When the Crystalline Entity attacks a colony, Riker, Dr. Crusher, and Data lead as many colonists underground as they can. The Entity completely destroys the planet's biological life, but the caves the colonists hide in protect them, something that the science community finds intriguing.
- Star Trek: Voyager: "Cold Fire": After the Nacene accidentally made the Ocampan homeworld an uninhabitable desert, they built a massive underground cavern with access to the only remaining natural water source on the planet and supplied it with energy via transmissions from an orbital "Array" in order to preserve a relic Ocampa population.
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Exploited by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne to trap Kimmy and three other women in a doomsday cult for fifteen years by telling them the world has ended and they need to stay in his underground bunker in order to keep them trapped. Subverted in that there is no apocalypse. Played for black comedy in the first scene and in flashback scenes to Kimmy's time in the bunker.
Apocalypse, Apocalypse / We caused it with our dumbness
Religion & Mythology
- According to the Vendidad, a Zoroastrian scripture, Yima (known in later Persian Mythology e.g. The Shahnameh as Jamshid) is told by God to create an enormous multi-level artificial cavern as a refuge in preparation for a devastating winter. Yima brings several thousand people into the Vara ("Enclosure"), where they grow seeds of every kind of plant and breed animals to sustain themselves until the winter ends.
Tabletop Games
- Earthdawn: When the Horrors swept over the world in the past, mortals survived by building and retreating within vast underground bunker-cities called Kaers.
- Felwinter: The frost gnomes fled underground to escape the original Felwinter cataclysm, and have lived there unbothered for centuries despite the horrors of the surface world.
Video Games
- ARK: Survival Evolved: Most of the Aberration expansion is underground — the sun has turned into a deadly radiation source that will kill you in seconds, and as a result the lifeforms that survived it have had to crawl underground.
- Arx Fatalis: In the background, the Sun died out and most civilizations of the world, in a rare moment of truce, moved underground into a network of caverns mixed with the old dwarven mines and rebuilt their cities and towns, such as the titular Arx. The entire game takes place underground.
- Blaster Master Zero: The stages are remnants of vast artificial underground habitats that humans once took refuge in after an ice age caused by a series of wars that rendered the surface uninhabitable for quite some time. This helps explain a Dub Induced Plothole that the original Blaster Master introduced, which incidentally turned the game's setting into a Fantastic Underworld without any real explanation.
- Digital Devil Saga 2: The Black Sun has forced humanity into underground cities because anyone exposed to the corrupted rays of sunlight who doesn't have Atma powers rapidly develops and succumbs to Cuvier Syndrome.
- Dino Run: You are a dinosaur bearing witness to the K-Pg extinction event, and you must run for your life and reach an underground dino sanctuary before the wave of pyroclastic destruction catches up to you. The sanctuary will be larger and more elaborate depending on your difficulty setting, and winning on the highest difficulty will instead let you board an alien spaceship and get whisked away to another planet.
- Fallout: The Vaults, underground cities where survivors of the US-China nuclear war fled, are a major part of the franchise. About half the games start with the protagonist leaving a Vault that managed to stay closed up until that point. It also turns out that Vault-Tec didn't actually intend the Vaults as refuges from the bombs, but as sociological experiments that the Enclave could exploit later.
- Far Cry 5: smaller bunkers can be found in and out of homes on the map, as most of the populus are some level of survivalists, and at the end of the game the player is stuck with Joseph Seed in one of the cults bunkers as nuclear war rages on the surface.
- Final Fantasy XIV: This is the backstory for the dungeons Tam-Tara Deepcroft, the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak, and Palace of the Dead, and the now Dummied Out Mun-Tuy Cellars. They are all parts of the ruins of an underground civilization called Gelmorra which was established after the peoples of The Black Shroud fled underground as the Elementals of the Twelveswood began to attack mankind.note However by the time of the game mankind had made peace with the Elementals and have returned to the surface, establishing the city of Gridania and its surrounding settlements. Gelmorra is now abandoned and only the home to monsters and cultists.
- Honkai Impact 3rd: In the backstory, the last survivors of the "Previous Era" decided to put themselves in cryosleep in bunkers deep beneath the earth to avoid the apocalypse brought by the Herrscher of the End. They woke up almost 50,000 years later in order to restart human civilization anew.
- Horizon: While a handful of smaller underground bunkers appear throughout the series, the most grandiose is Ted Faro's Thebes compound, where he planned to wait out the life-consuming robotic plague he himself created with a handpicked scientist to develop life-extending technology that would allow him to live far into the future. The quest "Faro's Tomb" in Horizon Forbidden West involves Aloy exploring the remains of Thebes after everything has (predictably for something Ted Faro was involved with) gone to pot.
- Legend of Legaia: The people of Octam were alerted of the approaching Mist by a prophet, and fled to the ancient underground ruins. They managed to survive there for ten years, but villains discovered this and started to methodically destroy the pillars the ruins stood on. By the time heroes arrive, the village is already half-destroyed, and the rest survives only because the bad guys are stopped in the nick of time. When the Mist is removed from the region, most people return to Octam, but some choose to remain in the caverns.
- Marathon 2: Durandal: The cybernetically enhanced S'pht fled several thousand feet below the surface of their home planet Lho'owhon to escape the nuclear strikes by the Pfhor that eventually enslaved them in the future. They left a message from the lost S'pht'Kr clan in the bunkers' computers for someone to find in the event of this happening.
- The New Order Last Days Of Europe:
- At the start of 1962, the West Siberian People's Republic had already developed an extensive series of underground factories and shelters to protect its population from the German bombers. Later on, they expand to become functional Underground Cities, with numerous underground corridors between them.
- Kaganovich will fall back on this strategy in the superregional stage to counter the threat of nuclear war. Dubbed Metro-2, the plan will construct a large network of tunnels in Tyumen to house 10,000 individuals and allow them to survive the fallout by living down there until resettlement on the surface is possible.
- Envisioning a future nuclear exchange with Germany, the Black League will construct complex subterranean bunker and metro systems beneath Omsk Oblast that can withstand nuclear blasts. When the Great Trial comes, and Russia and Germany finish exchanging their nukes, the Black League's soldiers would emerge from these bunkers, charge their way into what remains of Germany, and wipe out those remnants to utterly destroy the concept of Germany.
- Shin Megami Tensei IV: After the Firmament sealed Tokyo, the residents took refuge in the subway system to avoid the demons that freely roam the streets.
- Stellaris: A random event when discovering a tomb world is finding underground vaults. However, while there is a chance to find survivors in the vaults, it's just as likely to find no survivors, as well as potential hazards.
- Summer Rose Court: The survivors in Spiritus Bellatorum are forced to live in an underground tunnel network to stay safe from the chimera.
Webcomics
- Drowtales: In the past, the ancient elven civilizations' experiments with nether magic and demon summoning led to demons overrunning the world, nearly driving magic-using life to extinction. The surviving elves were forced to seek refuge in the hostile, lightless caverns of the underworld, where they created refugee camps that eventually grew into cities and where, over time, they became the drow.
Western Animation
- Beast Machines: Due to Megatron's Virus and legions of Vehicon drones taking over Cybertron, the surviving Maximals from Beast Wars are forced to reside in the caverns beneath their planet.
- Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: During the mutagen apocalypse some humans hid in underground complexes. The series starts with Kipo fleeing her bunker after a mega-baboon breaks it open and looks for the other survivors.
- The Simpsons: "Bart's Comet": Played for Laughs. When the titular comet is on its way to obliterate Springfield, the Simpsons head for the Flanders family's bomb shelter... followed by the rest of Springfield. They ultimately toss Ned Flanders out, but they get consumed by guilt and they all decide to leave...which is a good thing as the comet ends up only destroying the bomb shelter (and the balloon that started the whole thing).
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): After the fall of their empire, the Y'Lyntians were forced to take refuge in the caverns of the Earth, where they wait for the right moment to reclaim the surface.
