Around 2016, aurora photographers in Canada noticed a narrow purple ribbon arching across the sky, sometimes with green streaks. They nicknamed it STEVE, a nod to an animated film. Working with scientists and ESA's Swarm satellites, they showed it is not a typical aurora but a stream of very hot gas racing through the upper atmosphere.
On 27 August 1883, the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa was heard as far away as Rodrigues Island, nearly 4,800 km away. Its pressure wave was picked up by barometers worldwide and circled the globe several times. The tsunamis that followed killed more than 36,000 people.
The deepest known point in the ocean, Challenger Deep, lies roughly 10,900 m below the Pacific surface. Drop Everest in and its summit would still sit about 2 km underwater. Down there, the pressure is more than 1,000 times what you feel at sea level, roughly a tonne pressing on every square centimetre.