A view of a sinkhole, which stretches 20 meters by 30 meters, at the Solikamsk-2 mine in Russiaâ
From a missing plane to a vast city hidden beneath Earth, 2014 left many stones unturned. Although we made many discoveries over the course of 12 months, some of them led to even more puzzling questions.
MH370
What happened to the plane that vanished without a trace?
A crewman on a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion Rescue Flight 795
searches for debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on
April 1.
A Malaysia Airlines flight vanished without a trace while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. The weather was clear and there was no distress signal from the cockpit when the plane disappeared from radar screens. A massive search operation combed the Indian Ocean, but the Boeing 777 was never found.
After more than nine months, not a single piece of debris from MH370 has turned up. Despite numerous conspiracy theories, we still don't know what happened to the plane. All 239 people on board are presumed dead.
ICELAND'S VOLCANO
Why is Bardarbunga still erupting?
Image: ARCTIC-IMAGES/CORBIS
Bardarbunga created a 32 square mile lava field, which is the largest in Iceland since the Laki eruption in 1783, and the Icelandic Met Office says it is “probably the third largest lava field on Earth” since 1783. The gases released by the volcano have affected all of Iceland at one point or another, the first time that has happened in 150 years. The Met Office says the amount of sulfur released by this volcano may have exceeded that of any volcano on Earth of this particular type.
The eruption has caused the Bardarbunga caldera to sink to 184 feet, swallowing a GPS instrument that had been installed to measure the sinking rate. This is the largest amount of sinking, or subsidence, at any caldera in Iceland in modern times.
ADNAN'S STORY
Is the man spending life in prison the real killer of Hae Min Lee?
Image: Chicago Public Media
Currently, Adnan Syed is serving a life sentence for murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee when they were in high school. When Serial host Sarah Koenig started investigating the case a year ago, the strange story surrounding the murder of the Baltimore high school student, a lot of things didn't add up. There were no eye-witnesses tying Syed, who has been trying to prove his innocence for years, to the crime, and Syed's attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, failed to interview a witness who said she was with him at the time Lee was killed.
Ultimately, a Maryland appeals court will decide the man's fate. A hearing scheduled for January represents what Syed's lawyer, C. Justin Brown, said is the man's "last best chance" at freedom.
SIBERIAN SINKHOLES
What caused three deep holes in Russia's north?
Image: TASS/ZUMA WIRE
In November, a team of scientists, a medic and a professional climber plunged into the sinkhole to learn more about it, but the cause of the deep holes is still unknown.
SADDLE RIDGE GOLD
Was the $10 million treasure actually from a 1901 heist?
Image: Kagin's
Where did the gold come from?
The tale grew even more curious as we discovered that $30,000 worth of similar gold coins — that amount would be in the millions in today's dollars — had been stolen from the U.S. Mint in San Francisco in 1901. Soon we were all playing a game of whodunit.
Former San Francisco Mint clerk Walter N. Dimmick was charged with that theft, but, by the prosecution’s own admission, he was convicted on wholly circumstantial evidence. Despite the fact that the Secret Service searched all over California for those coins, they were never found.
But maybe that couple living in Northern California finally did.
CELEBRITY PHOTO HACK
Who is behind the attack that exposed A-listers' most private messages?
Image: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP/Associated Press
Apple confirmed the hackers had obtained the images by means of a "targeted" attack, though we still don't know who — or how many hackers — was involved. The FBI said it was looking into the case.
ALIEN MOON
Did scientists really discover an exomoon for the first time?
Researchers discovered the possible exomoon using gravitational microlensing — a technique that detects distant objects regardless of the light they emit — to take advantage of chance alignments between stars. When a foreground star passes between Earth and a more distant star, the closer star can act like a magnifying glass on the more distant one. If that star has a planet whizzing about it, the planet will brighten or dim the light of the distant star. But in some cases, the distant object could be a free-floating planet instead of a star, giving scientists the ability to measure the mass of the planet relative to its companion.
In this case, scientists could have spied a small star circled by a planet 18 times Earth's mass — or they could have spotted, for the first time, a planet bigger than Jupiter teamed up with a moon weighing less than Earth.
But because this encounter was completely random, it's impossible to know if we finally laid eyes on an exomoon. So, the search continues.
BENEATH STONEHENGE
What is the sprawling structure hidden under the world's most famous standing stones?
Image: Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project
"Stonehenge may never be the same again," said Vince Gaffney, the project's lead researcher.
And this is just the beginning — the vast majority of information from the site has yet to be analyzed.
"What you’re hearing about is simply a mere little finger of the amount of data that we have now," Gaffney told Mashable. "We think we’ve got at least another year’s work on this."
SONY HACK
Was North Korea really behind the massive cyberattack on Sony?
Image: EPA/KCNA
"One of the biggest mistakes is that because an attack can be traced to the North Korean Internet that somehow means it's the North Korean government. That's a false assumption because the North Korean Internet is basically provided by outside companies, in this case a Thai company," Jeffrey Carr, cybersecurity expert told Mashable. "Nothing presented excludes alternate scenarios, so why jump to the most serious one?"
MEXICAN STUDENTS
What happened to the 43 students who went missing?
Image: BRETT GUNDLOCK/BOREAL COLLECTIVE/MASHABLE
Nearly 80 people have been arrested following the kidnapping, including a mayor, his wife and a local police chief. But without their bodies, the case remains unsolved.
TWIN TWISTERS
What caused the double tornadoes that struck Pilger, Nebraska?
Image: Eric Anderson/Associated Press
The sibling tornado damage tracks were visible from space, where a NASA satellite spotted what look like nearly identical scars on the Earth's surface, separated by about two miles.
There are many things scientists still don’t know about tornadoes. For example, they still don’t know exactly why some severe, rotating thunderstorms, known as supercells, produce tornadoes while other nearly identical storms do not. The Pilger tornadoes demonstrated another unknown — how some storms can spawn multiple violent tornadoes at the same time.
Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center told Mashable after the event that the tornadoes were unusual since we rarely see such a “vivid example of a complex tornado.”
NIGERIAN GIRLS
Where are the schoolgirls who Boko Haram kidnapped?
Image: Sunday Alamba/Associated Press
In May, Nigeria's chief of defense staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, said the country's military had located the schoolgirls, but using force to free them is currently out of the question. Badeh did not specify the girls' location, and a U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said it could not confirm Nigeria's report.
By year's end, a majority of the girls remain missing.
STEALTHY SUBMARINE
Did the submarine spotted near Sweden come from Russia?
Image: TTT NEWS AGENCY / MARKO SAAVALA / ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Swedish military found traces of a mysterious submarine lurking in the water near the nation's capital, Stockholm, and many officials pointed the finger at Russia. But after a days-long search operation around the Stockholm Archipelago's 30,000 islands, Swedish officials called off the hunt. They said the submarine was foreign, but its country of origin remains unclear.
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