15 Of The Greatest Mysteries Ever Solved
by Benjamin Dzialdowski · BuzzFeedRecently, itz_cool_247 asked r/AskReddit, "Whats the greatest SOLVED Mystery?" So we thought we'd share some of the top responses.
1. "Where eels come from. It sounds dumb, but from the time of the ancient Egyptians, no one in Europe or North Africa knew where eels come from. They live in rivers, but they actually breed in an area of the Atlantic Ocean."
2. "Plate tectonics is a pretty great one. That solved a lot of problems in geology."
3. "A big one was the Rosetta Stone. Basically, it was the discovery of a mundane tablet that was a decree about something but was written in three languages, one of which was hieroglyphs. Before this, we didn't really know what anything meant. But from the discovery of the stone, it basically transformed our entire understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus the history."
4. "The Van Allen radiation belts. There was a lot of fear that any satellites or astronauts we sent up there would get fried; turns out we can orbit well below them, and if you travel fast enough through them, you can make it to the other side of each before it can kill you and/or fry your rocket's circuits."
5. "Clair Patterson discovering the age of the Earth."
"He was tasked with measuring the amount of lead that was the result of radioactive decay. His measurements were way off due to lead contamination. Eventually, Clair Patterson created the ultra-clean room to collect his samples. He was able to find the age of 4.6 billion years. The first person he told was his mother. While doing this, Clair Patterson learned just how contaminated the environment was with lead. He then advocated and succeeded in the banning of leaded petrol."
"Providing evidence that ultimately led to stopping leaded fuel was orders of magnitude more important, at least for humankind. He's one of the great big three scientists who helped save millions (potentially billions, because of the ramifications) of lives, and you've never heard of him (the others being Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk)."
6. "The 'Bloop'. In 1997, researchers monitoring underwater microphones for NOAA picked up an incredibly loud, ultra-low-frequency sound deep in the Pacific Ocean."
"It was so loud it was picked up by sensors over 3,000 miles apart. Because the audio profile looked exactly like a marine animal's vocalisation (but scaled up to an impossible size), conspiracy theorists and internet forums went wild, thinking we had discovered Cthulhu or a massive, undiscovered prehistoric leviathan.
Years later, NOAA finally solved it. It wasn't a biological creature at all. It was the sound of an 'icequake'—a massive iceberg cracking and breaking away from an Antarctic glacier. The sound waves just carried perfectly through the ocean's deep sound channel."
7. "The finding of the lost Franklin Expedition ships, the Erebus and the Terror, with the help of the Inuit and their stories, retold accurately, word for word, over generations."
8. "Solving where lots of diseases came from, including infections. The germ theory of disease. Most of the humans on the planet would be dead today. Infrastructure, commerce, the fight against hunger, and economic growth would all have continued to grow linearly. You would likely be working on a farm near the cemetery where your five siblings are buried and where your mum will soon rest."
9. "The Cretaceous–Palaeogene extinction event. I'm in my 50s. I still remember, as a kid, reading books asking, 'What killed the dinosaurs?' Some speculated meteor showers. Others said ice age. Nobody had a real clue. Even when the asteroid theory first came around, it was a little controversial."
10. "Time dilation. Without understanding how time dilation works, GPS errors would grow at 7 miles a day. It would be useless within hours."
11. "I was gonna say the discovery that ulcers were caused by a bacterium and not stress. Medicine had no idea how to effectively treat ulcers because they had no idea what really caused them. Then some Aussies figured out it was a bacterium, and BAM! Ulcers are not a thing anymore. Won a Nobel Prize and everything."
"Fun fact: although almost all ulcers are due to H. pylori or NSAIDs, you can get ulcers from stress - but the 'just went through several major surgeries in the last few weeks' type of stress, not the 'reports are due at the end of the quarter' type of stress."
12. "The location of Richard III's remains. Killed in battle in 1485, and his remains showed up under a car park over 500 years later. If it's not the greatest, it's certainly one of the most interesting, how science was able to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that 500-year-old remains belonged to the last English king killed in battle."
"I watched a documentary on that. They logically narrowed down his likely burial location from a good chunk of Britain to one exact spot. It had been the site of a church he was possibly buried near after dying in battle. They even brainstormed which end of the church he'd likely be near, or under. His body was in the first hole they dug."
13. "Scurvy's cause has to be one of the most maddening 'solved and then forgotten' mysteries in history."
"Vasco da Gama's crew actually figured out citrus cured it in 1497, and other ship surgeons rediscovered the same fact independently in the late 1500s and early 1600s, but the knowledge kept slipping away between voyages and generations. James Lind then ran one of the first controlled clinical trials in history in 1747, definitively proving citrus worked, and even he couldn't fully escape outdated medical theory enough to champion his own finding.
It took until 1928 for anyone to actually isolate vitamin C itself and understand why citrus worked all along, so the practical fix got found and lost repeatedly for over 400 years before the biology finally caught up with what sailors already knew."
14. "The Golden State Killer. The guy evaded police for forty years, and then decades later, they caught him by using crime scene DNA and a public genealogy website. The fact that he was a former police officer makes it even crazier."
15. "Probably not the biggest, but the one that made the biggest impact on me - finding Titanic. I had a phase as a kid where I read everything I could about the ship, the accident, the theories about where it went down, why, etc. An ocean liner that supposedly couldn't sink went down on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg. But no one knew why, or the details of it, or where it was. When they found it, seeing the recordings was just unreal."
H/T to itz_cool_247 and r/AskReddit for having the discussion!
What other solved mysteries do you find fascinating? Let us know in the comments below!
Additional thumbnail credits: A. Martin UW Photography / Getty Images, BBC One, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox