SortStack #1670 — 2031-01-04
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.
- 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.
- The first circumnavigation of the globe (Magellan's expedition) 3 years
Magellan himself never made it — he was killed in the Philippines. Just 18 of the original ~270 crew limped home aboard one remaining ship.
- A frilled shark's pregnancy 3.5 years
At an estimated three and a half years, it's the longest known gestation of any vertebrate — embryos grow just over a centimetre a month.
- Voyager 1's journey from launch to interstellar space 35 years
It carries a golden record with greetings in 55 languages and Chuck Berry — and it still phones home daily on a 1970s 8-track-era computer.