A Look back at the Biggest Events of the 2010s
/2010
The deadliest natural disaster of the decade happens in the first month of 2010: A 7.0 earthquake hits Haiti.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider successfully trap anti-matter for the first time.
Another team of scientists became the first to successfully create "synthetic life.”
Apple debuts the iPad.
Instagram and Pinterest launch.
2011
The death of Osama bin Laden.
The space shuttle fleet is retired.
The world’s first synthetic organ transplant.
Occupy Wall Street.
The Arab Spring rises.
The number of social media users around the world reaches 1 billion.
Google+ and Snapchat launch.
2012
Hurricane Sandy hits the US East Coast.
A mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado is followed months later by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The first license is issued in the United States for a self-driven car.
2013
The Black lives matter hashtag is first used.
A terror attack takes place at the Boston Marathon.
The Mayan calendar reaches the end of its cycle—leading to a bit of hysteria.
Personalized DNA sequencing is available for under $100.
The Oxford English Dictionary selects “selfie” as the word of the year.
2014
Google Glass is launched.
The deadliest outbreak of Ebola starts in West Africa.
The US begins restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge begins.
2015
The first Apple watch is officially released.
The Supreme Court strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage.
195 countries agree to the Paris Climate Agreement.
The number of PCs used around the world reaches 2 billion (it took 30 years to reach one billion but only 8 years to reach two billion).
The number of social media users (worldwide) also reaches 2 billion.
3D printing enters the consumer market.
The New Horizons probe arrives at Pluto while Voyager I enters the heliopause (the outer edge of our solar system).
2016
The US gets its first female presidential nominee of a major political party.
Britons vote in favor of Brexit—the UK withdrawal from the European Union.
The Chicago Cubs ends the longest drought in baseball by winning the World Series (the last time the Cubs won a World Series was in 1908, 108 years earlier).
2017
TicToc is released.
Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Washington, DC for the Women's March. Though an activist first coined the phrase #MeToo back in 2006, what’s typically known as the #MeToo movement exploded in late 2017 when a New York Times article revealed accusations against an influential Hollywood producer.
2018
A school shooting takes place at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
California becoming the sixth state to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana.
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico is left without electricity—for almost an entire year.
2019
Simone Biles raises her medal count to 25 world medals and 19 gold—the most of any gymnast, male or female, in history.
Donald Trump becomes the 4th US president to face possible impeachment.
The world’s top supercomputers achieve exaflop speed—that’s a million trillion calculations per second (a thousandfold improvement over machines at the beginning of the decade).