The COVID-19 pandemic
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It started as a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
By 30 January 2020 the World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency, and on 11 March it used a word that changed everything: pandemic.
Within days the dominoes fell — the NBA suspended its season, Tom Hanks announced he was infected, and travel bans slammed shut across the globe.
Whole countries went into lockdown, schools and offices emptied, and the world tipped into its sharpest economic contraction since the Great Depression.
Nothing about ordinary life — how people worked, shopped, learned, or said goodbye to the dying — would look the same again.
Australia’s Black Summer bushfires
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Fanned by the country’s hottest, driest year on record, bushfires that began in 2019 tore into early 2020, burning roughly 24 million hectares — an area larger than the whole of the United Kingdom.
Thirty-three people died directly, thousands of homes were lost, and the skies over Sydney turned an apocalyptic orange.
The toll on wildlife was almost unimaginable: the WWF later estimated nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced, with koalas among the worst hit.
Smoke drifted so far it crossed the Pacific and circled the globe.
The killing of Qasem Soleimani
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The year was three days old when a US drone strike near Baghdad airport killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force and the architect of its influence across the Middle East.
Iran’s supreme leader vowed “severe revenge,” and on 8 January Iran fired ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases housing American troops.
That same jittery night, Iranian forces mistook a passenger jet for an incoming missile and shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, killing all 176 people aboard.
For a few tense days it felt as though the two nations were sliding toward open war. They pulled back — but the loss of the plane’s passengers remains one of the year’s most haunting tragedies.
Kobe Bryant’s death
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On 26 January, a helicopter carrying basketball icon Kobe Bryant crashed into a fog-shrouded hillside in Calabasas, California.
All nine people on board were killed, including Bryant, 41, and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna. They had been on their way to a youth basketball game.
The news detonated across the sporting world and far beyond it, drawing tributes from presidents, players, and fans who lit up landmarks in Lakers purple and gold. Few athletes have been mourned so widely, or so suddenly.
Brexit becomes real
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At 11pm on 31 January, after 47 years of membership and three and a half years of political turmoil, the United Kingdom formally left the European Union — the only member state ever to do so.
It didn’t happen with a bang so much as a slow exhale, followed immediately by an eleven-month “transition period” in which almost nothing changed on the ground.
The real cliff-edge came at year’s end: a UK-EU trade deal was struck on 24 December, days before the deadline.
For anyone in Ireland, the stakes were especially close to home, with the Irish border sitting at the heart of the whole negotiation.
George Floyd protests
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On 25 May, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
A bystander’s video spread across the internet within hours, and the response was seismic.
What followed were the largest racial-justice protests in the United States since the civil rights era, and the movement leapt borders — demonstrations filled streets in dozens of countries, statues linked to slavery came down, and “Black Lives Matter” became a global rallying cry.
Chauvin was later convicted of murder. It was, by many measures, the broadest protest movement in modern history.
SpaceX launches astronauts
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On 30 May, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station aboard the Crew Dragon capsule.
It was the first launch of astronauts from US soil since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011 — and the first time a private company had ever sent humans into orbit.
The pair spent about two months on the station before splashing safely back down in the Gulf. A new, commercial chapter of spaceflight had begun.
The Beirut port explosion
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On 4 August, roughly 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate — stored carelessly in a warehouse for about six years — caught fire and detonated at the Port of Beirut.
It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, powerful enough to be felt as a small earthquake.
More than 200 people were killed, around 7,000 injured, and an estimated 300,000 left homeless as the blast tore through half the Lebanese capital.
It landed on a country already crushed by financial collapse, and the public fury was immediate. Within days, the prime minister and his cabinet resigned.
War over Nagorno-Karabakh
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On 27 September, decades of frozen conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupted into open war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Over 44 days, Azerbaijan — backed by Turkey and making heavy use of combat drones — broke through Armenian lines and captured the strategic town of Shusha. Thousands were killed on both sides.
Russia brokered a ceasefire on 9 November that handed Azerbaijan swathes of territory and sent Russian peacekeepers into the region.
The drone-driven victory was studied closely by militaries around the world as a glimpse of how future wars might be fought.
The US presidential election
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Held on 3 November against the backdrop of the pandemic, the US election drew the highest turnout by percentage since 1900.
Joe Biden defeated the incumbent Donald Trump by 306 electoral votes to 232, and pulled in more than 81 million votes — the most ever cast for a presidential candidate.
A record surge of mail-in ballots slowed the count, and news outlets didn’t call the race until 7 November.
Trump refused to concede and made repeated, unproven claims of fraud that officials across both parties rejected.
Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, became the first woman, and first woman of colour, elected US vice president.
The first COVID vaccines arrive
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The year that began in dread ended with a needle and a glimmer of hope. In a feat that normally takes a decade, effective COVID-19 vaccines were developed, tested, and approved in under a year.
On 2 December the UK became the first country to authorise the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, and on 8 December a 90-year-old grandmother named Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world to receive an approved dose outside a trial.
It was also the first vaccine using mRNA technology ever cleared for humans, with jabs from Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and Russia’s Sputnik V following close behind. After a year of loss, the fight-back had finally begun.