SortStack #1684 — 2031-01-18

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. A single wingbeat of a hovering hummingbird 12.6 ms

   Up to 80 wingbeats per second lets hummingbirds hover, fly backwards, and even fly upside down — no other bird can do all three.

2. Half-time in a football (soccer) match 15 min

   The break exists partly thanks to early English schools with different rules — teams switched codes at the interval when playing each other.

3. La Tomatina, Spain's giant tomato fight 60 min

   Around 120 tonnes of overripe tomatoes are hurled in Buñol each August; a firework marks the end and the streets are hosed down within hours.

4. The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza 20 years

   Herodotus and modern estimates agree on roughly two decades — meaning workers placed a multi-tonne block about every five minutes of daylight.

5. The time since the last woolly mammoths died out 4K years

   A dwarf population survived on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BC — meaning mammoths were alive while the Giza pyramids were already centuries old.

6. The time humans have lived in Australia 65K years

   Aboriginal Australians' roughly 65,000 years make theirs the oldest continuous culture on Earth — some oral histories describe coastlines drowned by rising seas 10,000 years ago.

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