2004, Year OTT Union Time Line

2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2004th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 4th year of the 3rd millennium, the 4th year of the 21st century, and the 5th year of the 2000s decade.

2004 was designated as:

International Year of Rice (by the United Nations) International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and its Abolition (by UNESCO )

January 3 – Flash Airlines Flight 604 crashes into the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt, killing all 148 aboard making it one of the deadliest aviation accidents in Egyptian history at the time. January 8 – The RMS Queen Mary 2, the largest ocean liner ever built, is christened by her namesake's granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. February 4 - Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site Facebook February 26 – Macedonian president Boris Trajkovski is killed in a plane crash near Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. June 21 – In Mojave, California, Spaceship One becomes the first privately funded space plane to achieve spaceflight. The Cassini–Huygens spacecraft arrives at Saturn. August 3 – NASA's unmanned MESSENGER spacecraft is launched, with its primary mission being the study of Mercury. November 16 – NASA's hyper sonic Scram jet breaks a record by reaching a velocity of about 7,000 mph (Mach 9.6) in an unmanned experimental flight. December 27 – Astrophysicists from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich measure the strongest burst from a magnetar. At 21:30:26 UT Earth is hit by a huge wave front of gamma and X-rays. It is the strongest flux of high-energetic gamma radiation measured so far. December 31 – Taipei 101, at the time the tallest skyscraper in the world, standing at a height of 1,670 feet (509 meters), officially opens.

In 2004, CE for the first time in the history of speleology, the Ukrainian Speleological Association expedition reached a depth greater than 2,000m, and explored the cave to −2,080m. Ukrainian diver Gennadiy Samokhinextended the cave by diving in the terminal sump to 46m depth in 2007 CE and then to 52 m in 2012 CE, setting successive world records of 2,191m and 2,197m respectively. Krubera remains the only known cave on Earth deeper than 2,000 meters.