Most natural hazards like floods, landslides, storms or fires are related to extreme weather conditions and increasingly impact society. Developing protection strategies is an urgent issue but necessitates profound knowledge of the recurrence interval and physical processes triggering such events. In particular the role of global warming on the frequency of natural hazards is still largely unknown. Long time series of extreme events reconstructed from sediment archives are tools to better understand the role of climate boundary conditions on the occurrence of extreme events. This session will focus on the potential and pitfalls of detecting past extreme events in terrestrial and marine archives including lake sediments, floodplains, alluvial fan-delta and continental shelf and slope. Since dating is a critical issue, contributions based on annually laminated archives, tephrocronology or state of the art of geochronological methodologies are especially welcome.