SortStack #333 — 2027-05-08
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A lightning flash from start to finish 198 ms
What looks like one bolt is usually several return strokes in a row, heating the air to around 30,000°C — five times hotter than the Sun's surface.
- A typical national anthem performance at a sports event 1.5 min
Uruguay's full anthem runs about five minutes, while Japan's 'Kimigayo' has just four lines — the shortest lyrics of any anthem on Earth.
- The Titanic's sinking, from iceberg to going under 2.7 h
The ship's band famously kept playing on deck for most of it — and the iceberg itself had likely calved from a Greenland glacier years earlier.
- The Isner-Mahut match, the longest in tennis history 11.1 h
The 2010 Wimbledon first-rounder stretched over three days with a 70-68 final set — the scoreboard wasn't programmed to go that high and broke.
- Rio de Janeiro's Carnival, official festival period 5 days
Around two million people hit the streets per day, and the samba school parade is a fierce contest judged on dozens of criteria.
- One year on Mercury (a full orbit of the Sun) 88 days
Mercury's spin is so slow that a single sunrise-to-sunrise day there lasts about two of its years — you could outwalk its sunset.