2010
Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire
A 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor humiliated by police and bureaucrats walked into a square in Sidi Bouzid, doused himself with paint thinner, and lit a match. He died in a hospital in January. By then his act of desperate protest had ignited the Arab Spring, toppling four dictators within a year and shaking the rest.
Haiti earthquake
A magnitude 7.0 quake hit ten miles from Port-au-Prince in the late afternoon, collapsing the presidential palace, the cathedral, and acres of cinder-block neighborhoods built without reinforcement. Estimates of the dead ranged from 100,000 to 300,000. A poor country became poorer, and the international relief effort became a case study in failure and misplaced good intentions.
Pakistan's monsoon megaflood
Unprecedented monsoon rains swelled the Indus until a fifth of Pakistan was underwater, inundating an area roughly the size of England. Twenty million people lost homes, livestock, and crops, and nearly two thousand died. Whole villages were photographed only as rooftops above brown water. The disaster previewed the climate-driven catastrophes that would batter Pakistan for years.
Eyjafjallajökull grounds Europe
An Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name spewed a high-altitude ash cloud that drifted over Europe and grounded most commercial flights for a week, stranding an estimated ten million passengers worldwide. Travelers slept on airport floors, business meetings collapsed across the continent, and a civilization built on frictionless air travel rediscovered the existence of trains and the humbling power of unforgiving geology.
Chilean miners trapped
A copper-and-gold mine collapsed in northern Chile and trapped thirty-three men 700 meters underground for sixty-nine days. A narrow rescue capsule winched them out one by one in October as the world watched live television. They emerged squinting into floodlights, tearful and famous, and into book deals and a movie.
iPad unveiled
Steve Jobs sat in a leather armchair onstage in San Francisco and demonstrated a slab of glass that was halfway between a phone and a laptop. Critics laughed at the name. Within five years the tablet had reshaped publishing, education, and the way restaurants printed menus. The post-PC era had a face.
Deepwater Horizon explodes
BP's offshore rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and rupturing a wellhead a mile beneath the surface. For 87 days oil gushed in real time on underwater cameras. By the time engineers capped it, more than four million barrels had stained the marshes from Louisiana to Florida.