Doomscrolling—the fun way! Our picks for best multimedia stories in 2024

Of all the multimedia novelties that got the public’s attention in 2024, the proliferation of artificial intelligence was the most sensational. AI-generated images and videos now fill screens and social media feeds in ways that are mesmerizing, hilarious, and terrifying—sometimes all at once. Some examples of AI-generated material simply make for good memes; others have been used to undermine democratic elections.

But while the Bulletin is certainly paying close attention to developments with AI, you’re unlikely to see AI-generated visuals on this site. We Bulletin multimedia editors are proud to be human. And the content we generate comes from our own weird minds. So here are some of our favorite stories we worked on in 2024, from our minds to your eyes.

The Underwater Amazon
By Paul Tullis, with photos by Adriane Ohanesian
Roaming from South Africa to Portugal to California, Paul Tullis’ literal dive into global kelp forests gave us a close-up view of ancient and complex ecosystems that are struggling to survive in a world reshaped by humans. “While the Amazon is branded as ‘the lungs of the Earth’ for its extensive oxygen production,” Tullis wrote, “it’s actually marine algae, including kelp, that have been responsible or the preponderance of oxygen in the atmosphere.” Paired with Tullis’ vivid descriptions, Adriane Ohanesian’s painterly photographs brought this underwater world to life and spotlighted the efforts of scientists and entrepreneurs trying to save the kelp forests, and by extension, the world.

We decided to publish a video with this story too, because, like the diversity of marine life within the kelp forests, it was so rich with things to see—like a clip of an octopus stealing Paul’s camera.

When Rome’s fountains run dry
By Gabriele Di Donfrancesco, with photos by Frederico Ambrosini
Few things are more quintessentially Roman than the Roman aqueducts. For millennia, these engineering marvels, and their modern incarnations, have filled thousands of fountains in Rome with water carried from distant mountain springs. But as Gabriele Di Donfrancesco reported, climate change, wastefulness, and neglect are harming these natural sources; with temperatures rising and rainfall declining, water rationing for Italy’s capital may be on the horizon. Photos, maps and charts transport us to Europe to better understand how 21st-century conditions threaten Rome’s ancient legacy.

A rising danger in the Arctic
By Valerie Brown
It might seem like little could be scarier than “zombie viruses” escaping from the Arctic as global warming melts frozen carcasses and revives dormant pathogens. But reading Valerie Brown’s investigation of thawing permafrost and visualizing the effects of human activity on the Arctic landscape, we learned that microbes are already widely present in the organic matter beneath the icy surface. As the geography of the region changes, mining, cargo ship traffic and wildfires have become more common, offering these (sometimes prehistoric) microbes a way to reach areas populated by vulnerable animals and humans. Amid a lack of data and Russia’s increasing isolation, scientists are racing to fill in the gaps in knowledge that could help prevent a global health disaster.

An existential presidential timeline
By Thomas Gaulkin, François Diaz-Maurin, Jessica McKenzie,  Matt Field, and Sara Goudarzi
In 2024, our multimedia team continued to find new ways to explain complex stories. As the US presidential election approached, we thought it prudent to reflect on how the existential threats the Bulletin is most concerned about—nuclear risk, climate change, biosecurity, and disruptive technologies—have been handled over the last two presidencies. Editors selected key moments from the Trump and Biden administrations in each of those topic areas, and the multimedia team gathered them into an interactive timeline that makes it easy to compare how things were handled by the White House over the last eight years—like their nearly mirror decisions to stay in, or out, of the Paris climate agreement.

In Sudan, “climate wars” are useful scapegoats for bad leaders
By Harry Verhoeven
Sudan has been mired in violent conflict for decades. Sudan has also suffered the effects of worsening climate change. Combined, these disasters have led to the deaths of millions. But according to Harry Verhoeven, the idea of “climate wars” has been exploited by Sudanese warlords to distract from their own failures. “Rural Sudan is not war-torn because of a changing climate,” Verhoeven wrote. “Rather, it is acutely vulnerable to a changing climate because of violence and mismanagement by Sudanese elites.” Scrolling maps highlighted how the climate crisis, which has disrupted herding patterns and driven animosity between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers, is further exploited by warlords to recruit fighters and drive conflict.

How an obscure atmospheric phenomenon causes catastrophic flooding in California
By Chad Small
Chad Small, a member of the Bulletin’s editorial fellows program, explored how an obscure atmospheric event called the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) led to extreme flooding in Los Angeles, California. The multimedia team developed a scrolling video animation, which traced how the MJO created an atmospheric river that funneled into a small area and lead to an enormous amount of rain.

The short march to China’s hydrogen bomb
By Hui Zhang
An exhaustive history of China’s quest to develop a hydrogen bomb, richly illustrated with archival material and illustrations. Detailed 3D diagrams peeled back the layers of China’s “boosted layer-cake” design to show how its first thermonuclear weapon used primary and secondary devices to initiate a fusion chain reaction. The country’s first hydrogen bomb test occurred on December 28, 1966, with an explosive yield of 122 kilotons. Six months later, on June 17, 1967, China tested a full-yield device, producing an air-burst nuclear explosion with a yield of 3.3 megatons—more than 200 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

How many people were killed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Video by Erik English
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an organization of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or hibakusha. The group, called Nihon Hidankyo, was chosen for “its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” Earlier this year, we published a video based on Alex Wellerstein’s groundbreaking research for “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki” feature article. The video features film footage of Hiroshima prior to the bombing, generously provided by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and highlights the difficulty of quantifying the devastating human toll of nuclear weapons.

As ever, the Doomsday Clock remains the most iconic visual demonstration of the existential risk confronting humanity today. Few other images have distilled so much thought so succinctly. To illustrate the longevity of the Doomsday Clock and its impact, this year we produced a new scrolling timeline that traces its movements, its role in popular culture, and each of the Bulletin’s published statements on the setting of the Clock hands. Lest we forget, they were first set to seven minutes to midnight in 1947, when artist Martyl Langsdorf designed a cover for the Bulletin to serve as a metaphor for urgency—“It suited my eye,” she said. Today, 25 clock changes and 600 covers later, it is just 90 seconds to midnight.