1. Sandy Devastates the U.S. Northeastern Coast
Like a bad horror movie sequel, Hurricane Sandy churned up the U.S. east coast this fall, making landfall on the New Jersey shore just before Halloween and a little more than a year after Hurricane Irene took a similar path. Unlike Hurricane Irene, which devastated inland communities with torrential rains, Sandy's wrath came in the form of hurricane-force winds and a storm surge exceeding four meters—enough to reshape the New Jersey and Long Island shorelines as well as inundatecritical New York City infrastructure, such as subway tunnels and power stations, among other ill effects.
Meteorologists dubbed Sandy a “frankenstorm” for its meteorologic mash-up of a hurricane moving up from the south, a winter storm moving in from the west and a ridge of high pressure forcing the systems to merge and move inland. Add in the fact that the tropical cyclone alone stretched more than 1,500 kilometers across and boasted the lowest pressure of any storm ever recorded north of North Carolina—943 millibars—and Sandy certainly merited the designation “superstorm.”
Climate change seems to have intensified the event. A record summer sea ice melt in the Arctic likely helped create the weather conditions that forced Hurricane Sandy along its ill-fated track. The storm also gained "a little bit of extra kick from the slightly warmer than normal waters it will be tracking over," noted James Franklin, the branch chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center.
The disaster, which inflicted at least $50-billion worth of damage and claimed at least 250 lives, 131 in the U.S. alone, showed the vulnerability of our cities and coastal communities. Sandy's legacy demands new thinking as to how best to prepare forfuture punishing storms, likely to be even stronger in our ever-warmer world. —David Biello
2. The Higgs Boson Is Detected
This year the best Fourth of July fireworks took place in Europe. On that warm summer’s day, in a conference room not far from the shores of Lake Geneva, physicists representing two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider celebrated the news four decades in the making: The Higgs boson had been found.
The next day’s front-page headline ofThe New York Times read “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe,” but the Higgs discovery is about much more than enhancing our understanding of the subatomic world. The Higgs represents the final chapter in the story of 21st-century particle physics. It completes the Standard Model, the theoretical description of all the known particles and forces (and by some metrics the most successful theory in the history of science). From here, hopes are that scientists at the LHC will make discoveries that illuminate the universe beyond the Standard Model, providing fireworks for years to come. —Michael Moyer
3. NASA’s Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars
In 2012 Mars received a new six-wheeled visitor. NASA’s Curiosity rover—the biggest, most sophisticated explorer of its kind—landed safely on the Red Planet in August. The successful touchdown capped an elaborate landing sequence that had been dubbed “seven minutes of terror” and made mini-celebrities out of mission engineers (notably flight director Bobak Ferdowsi, aka the “Mohawk guy”).
Curiosity’s roughly two-year mission on Mars has only just begun—the rover is still trying out some of its instruments for the first time. But already the rover has foundevidence of an ancient riverbed and has detected tantalizing but unconfirmed hints of Martian carbon (the stuff of life on Earth) in the soil. Soon Curiosity will begin to explore Mount Sharp, a towering stack of sedimentary layers that should provide clues to the conditions that prevailed on ancient Mars, when water flowed more freely.—John Matson
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