Limalok is a guyot, an undersea volcanic mountain with a flat top, in the southeastern Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Located at a depth of 1,255 metres (4,117 ft) with a 636-square-kilometre (246 sq mi) summit platform, it is joined to Mili Atoll and Knox Atoll through a volcanic ridge. Limalok probably started as a shield volcano built up from basaltic rocks; the Macdonald, Rarotonga, Rurutu and Society hotspots may have been involved in its formation. A period of erosion and flattening began around 56 million years ago. During the Paleocene and Eocene, a carbonate platform (mostly red algae) supported an atoll, or an atoll-like structure with reefs. The platform sank below sea level roughly 46–50 million years ago during the Eocene, perhaps because the equatorial area it moved through was too hot or nutrient-rich to support the growth of a coral reef. Thermal subsidence lowered the drowned seamount to its present depth. ( Full article...)

Elizabeth Richards Tilton

• ... that although Elizabeth Richards Tilton (pictured) was a central figure in a six-month-long trial, she was never allowed to speak in court?
• ... that the Sandyhills area of Glasgow once contained two coal mines, a factory making foamslag blocks, and a chemical works producing tar?
• ... that British jurist Bin Cheng invented a legal theory which states that a customary international law may be created "overnight"?
• ... that the Broe helmet, an artefact of the Vendel Period, was discovered while digging up a garden?
• ... that although Ernest Fahmy played for Abertillery RFC in Wales, he opted to play international rugby for Scotland?
• ... that after taking the unprofitable station off the air, Harold Orr hired a crew of young announcers to broadcast on KSVY 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, to keep the license?
• ... that Lu Shijia, founder of China's first university aerodynamics program, twice declined nominations to the Chinese Academy of Sciences?
• ... that the Balloon went up in 1784 and added air in 1802, but now Highways England wants to blow it up?

SMS Scharnhorst, c. 1908

• In New Zealand, the Whakaari/­White Island volcano erupts, killing at least six people and injuring many others.
• A factory fire in Delhi, India, kills at least forty-three people and injures more than fifty others.
• In India, the four suspects in the Hyderabad gang rape case are shot dead by the police.
• The wreck of the cruiser SMS Scharnhorst (pictured), which sank during the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, is discovered.

December 10: Human Rights Day; Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, Sweden

Calbraith Perry Rodgers

• 1768 – The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was released in Edinburgh.
• 1884 – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by American author Mark Twain was first published in the United Kingdom and Canada, two months earlier than in the US.
• 1911 – Calbraith Perry Rodgers (pictured) completed the first transcontinental flight across the United States.
• 1979 – The Kuomintang dictatorship of Taiwan arrested a large number of opposition leaders who had organized pro-democracy demonstrations, an incident credited with ending the party's rule in 2000.
• 1989 – At the first open pro-democracy demonstration in Mongolia, journalist Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj announced the formation of the Mongolian Democratic Union, which would be instrumental in ending communist rule four months later.

Nikephoros III Botaneiates (d. 1081) · Caroline Mehitable Fisher Sawyer (b. 1812) · Abdullah Yusuf Ali (d. 1953)