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When earthquake scientists detected a signal unlike anything they’d ever heard in September 2023, they couldn’t have known the magnitude of the discovery they were about to make. Monitoring stations across the world were picking up a monotonous hum and couldn’t work out what it was.
It took time, but they eventually realised that the unusual activity was caused by a massive landslide in a remote fjord in Greenland that had triggered a mega-tsunami the size of a skyscraper. And it had all happened without anyone ever seeing any of it.
In their account of how they worked out that this is what had occurred, the scientists explain how they know that the wave they registered was taller than those that hit countries in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and Japan in 2011 – and that it vibrated across the entire Earth for nine days. Their before and after pictures of the site of the landslide are quite a thing to see.
Tomorrow marks 60 years since the first ever issue of The Sun was published, bombastically declaring on its front page that “the British public believe it is time for a new newspaper, born of the age we live in”. The tabloid actually had quite an inauspicious first few years before a savvy young businessman called Rupert Murdoch bought it for a song. He had a different vision for the paper and the rest is history – if a rather chequered one, as this look back at the highs and lows of a Fleet Street legend reveals.
Following that absolutely crackers debate this week, former US president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump is as unapologetic as ever. Despite spouting blatant falsehoods about migrants eating pets and claiming there’s such a thing as a post-birth abortion, Trump simply won’t back down. This is part of a new kind of tactic which sees politicians embracing their villainy rather than trying to avoid blame. If you feel worn down by the politics of the past decade, it’s in no small part because of this infuriating style of rhetoric. Mercifully, academics are beginning to work out a strategy to combat it.
And in an extraordinary interview with one of this year’s Ig Nobel prize winners, we learn that most of the people in the world aged over 110 have no birth certificate, and are unlikely to be as old as we think they are.
Also this week, why you should opt out of the internet’s latest absurd challenge, why your knees are so rubbish – and why I better not catch you calling anyone a “thornback”.
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