Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2013 i National Geographic Magazine

We are accustomed to hearing about catastrophes that change life in an instant—an earthquake, a fire, an explosion. But there is a catastrophe that is playing out in slow motion, measured out over the course of years, decades, and centuries. And it’s happening now. The culprit is not so much nature as ourselves. our catastrophe has to do with dependence on fossil fuels, which has sparked a chain of events that has warmed the atmosphere and oceans and melted glaciers and continental ice sheets, and consequently raised sea levels. One estimate says that by 2070 the coastal flooding that will result from this rise may affect nearly 150 million people living in port cities. “We have irreversibly committed future generations to a hotter world and rising seas,” says author tim…

This page features two photographs: one chosen by our editors and one chosen by our readers via online voting. For more information, go to yourshot.nationalgeographic.com. EDITORS’ CHOICE Alexei Aliyev Nizhniy Tagil, Russia When Alexei Aliyev’s family came back from a neighbor’s birthday party, they discovered that a turkey had escaped from their farm. After his mother went to retrieve it, Aliyev stopped her so he could take a photo in front of their house. “Photograph quickly,” she told him. “He is very heavy!” READERS’ CHOICE Jeff Rose Batesville, Arkansas On his way to photograph waterfalls on the Ozark Plateau, Rose passed a pair of male elk—one young, one older—sharing a quiet moment, a rarity among males that often spar with each other. Immediately after Rose took this photo, the bull…

There are 52 bones in the feet—about 25 percent of a human body’s total. Thousands of fairy circles dot southern Africa’s deserts. Cultural lore has long attributed the grassy loops to supernatural causes. New research points to a more earthly source. Ecologist Norbert Juergens found Psammotermes allocerus, a termite species that lives in sand, under almost all of the nearly 2,000 circles he visited. “The termites are damaging the roots of the grasses that germinate in the bare patch,” says Juergens. The termite-engineered ecosystem comes with benefits. A lack of plants above the nest means the soil retains more water for the insects to consume. A circle forms when nearby grasses tap into the new reservoir and grow thicker, up to three feet tall. The combination of soil moisture and…

As the planet warms, the sea rises. Coastlines flood. What will we protect? What will we abandon? How will we face the danger of THE DAMAGE DONE By the time Sandy struck the Northeast, as a NASA computer model (above) had predicted four days earlier, it had killed 72 people in the Caribbean. It was no longer a hurricane—but it was a thousand miles wide, with 80-mile-anhour winds that drove the sea onto the coast in lethal surges. Te fnal death toll was 147. As the world warms, it may see more storms like Sandy. It will certainly see higher seas. BY THE TIME HURRICANE SANDY VEERED TOWARD THE NORTHEAST coast of the United States last October 29, it had mauled several countries in the Caribbean and left dozens dead.…

The rumbling outside my tent sounds more like an earthquake than the wind. I instinctively flinch, burrowing deeper into my sleeping bag. I’ve faced terrifying winds before: the roar of the jet stream in the Himalaya at night, the fearsome howl of a Patagonian tempest. This is worse. The ground shakes as the next surge races toward me. My tent is lashed between two boulders in a desolate wilderness deep in the Wohlthat Mountains of Antarctica. My three teammates are hunkered down nearby. Fifty miles to the south is the edge of the Polar Plateau, the vast frozen upland that dominates the continent’s interior. Geography and gravity combine here to unleash powerful katabatic winds—dense waves of cold air that rush down mountain corridors like avalanches tumbling toward the sea. The…

He emerges from a shed that is no bigger than a jail cell, though it is brightly painted and a sign above its door announces, Place de la Culture et des Arts. The artist lives here, works here. He is 32, with a Mohawk, gold earrings, oversize black-framed glasses, cowboy boots, a Dolce & Gabbana belt, and a flowing copper hooded silk shirt. His name is Dario, and he wishes to inform us, “I am the king of this neighborhood.” The neighborhood in question is Matete: cramped, impoverished, rough, known for its athletes and its thieves. (Not so much for its fashion-conscious artists. Once, in another neighborhood, Dario was mugged and robbed of his fancy clothes, compelling him to take up boxing so he could defend himself.) Beside Dario’s shed,…

Every month this page features our staff picks of National Geographic Society products and events. For more go to nglive.org. The Secret Life of Predators From scorpions in Southeast Asia to sailfish off the coast of Mexico (left, chasing a school of sardines), nature’s hunters must constantly adapt to keep their place in the food chain. This month the National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo WILD get closer than ever to the action with unprecedented coverage of some of Earth’s toughest fights to the finish. PLAY ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL The life and legacy of Alexander Graham Bell—the Society’s second President—set the scene for a new play by PBS’s Jim Lehrer. Catch a performance September 12 through 21 in Washington, D.C. For tickets go to nglive.org/dc. FILM JERUSALEM 3-D Witness Jerusalem…

While filled with interesting anecdotes, the story of the search for life-extending genes is based on a naive technological optimism. It misses the profound question of how we can better meet the increasing challenges to public health around the world. Many of the basic tools that have extended average life spans are seriously at risk. The director-general of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, warned that “a post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it.” These are the types of issues on which funding, research, and policy need to be focused. KEN DAHLBERG Kalamazoo, Michigan The table of contents listing asks, “You want to live to 120? And stay healthy?” I want to live to 120, even if I don’t stay healthy. Good health…

Major leaguers broke 1,697 baseball bats between July and September 2012. It’s not surprising, given what the skinny piece of wood has to withstand. When a 90-plus-mile-an-hour pitch makes contact, it exerts about 8,000 pounds of force, and vibrations ripple across the bat. If the ball hits a weak spot, the wood may break. Ash generally holds up. Today, though, more players, many out of superstition or bat feel, prefer maple bats, which constitute 64 percent of all sales. But maple’s grain—shaped into a bat—can make the wood weaker. Scientists are studying broken major league bats to improve maple bats’ stamina and develop regulations to avoid multiple-piece breaks to prevent injury. Inside pitches are the culprit about two-thirds of the time, catching the bat at its thinnest. “If batters could…

Pam Longobardi is an artist—and a trash collector. Pieces of carefully tagged plastic debris she’s picked up from coasts around the world fill her Atlanta, Georgia, studio. Many of the seaworn toys, tangled nets, and fishing floats were spewed onto beaches from Hawaii to California by currents of the North Pacific Gyre, and thousands of the pieces will find their way into her art. Now Longobardi has more to work with. She was part of a team of scientists and artists on the 2013 Gyre Expedition. The group traveled to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and Katmai National Park to collect and source gyre-carried trash. A traveling exhibit of scientific findings and art made from the debris is planned for 2014. Learn more and see videos from the 2013 Gyre Expedition at…

What would happen to New York if the storm surge hurled at it by a storm like Sandy were riding on a sea that had risen five feet higher? That’s the high end of the range in 2100 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now recommends planning for. Sandy’s surge flooded subway tunnels, knocked out the power grid in lower Manhattan for days, and damaged 218,000 cars in the region as a whole. If the city doesn’t protect itself, a future flood will surge farther and deeper into its cavernous streets.…

UNTIL GALILEO CAME ALONG in the early 1600s, people thought the moon was an unblemished sphere. His crude telescope revealed shifting shadows, which the astronomer correctly interpreted as mountains, craters, and valleys. As it turns out, mountains appear all over the solar system. Spacecraft orbiting the inner planets have sent back images and bounced laser beams and radar waves off their surfaces to measure heights. In the early 1970s Apollo astronauts even sampled rock on lunar highlands. Unmanned missions to the outer planets show giant peaks on the asteroid Vesta and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn (the planets themselves are mostly giant balls of gas). The origins of extraterrestrial mountains offer clues to the solar system’s turbulent history. Asteroid and comet crashes have created mountainous crater rims. Magma flow,…

At the end of the 19th century a middle-aged Swedish engineer, a patent officer captivated by the promise and possibilities of technology, came up with a radical idea: Why not fly in a hydrogen balloon to become the first to discover the North Pole, then as mysterious and unknown as Mars? For years explorers had attempted to reach the Pole overland; many died trying. An air expedition, Salomon August Andrée reasoned, would eliminate much of the risk. And so, on a windy day in July 1897, with support from Alfred Nobel and Sweden’s king, Andrée and two younger colleagues climbed into the basket of a 67-foot-diameter balloon on Danes Island in the Svalbard archipelago. The team packed wooden sledges, food for several months, carrier pigeons to relay messages, even a…

In Kinshasa a woman punched photojournalist Pascal Maitre in the forehead. It was an accident—he got too close to some young women who were boxing. Everyone laughed, a light moment during a tense assignment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa is rife with crime and poverty, but its people eagerly pursue the arts and athletics. This boxing club has ties to past glory too: The women train in the now dilapidated stadium where Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought in 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle.” BEHIND THE LENS Kinshasa can be dangerous. How did you protect yourself? PM: The city is impressive and chaotic, but it’s not more dangerous than most big cities. Of course, you have to be with people who know their way around and who…

My team was studying the bird species of the Himalaya when ten people with machine guns entered our camp and said, “You’re coming with us.” We usually work 11,000 feet up in the mountains, but we had dropped down to monitor the birds living at the lower elevations. At 8,000 feet there’s a road. If we’d been higher up, they wouldn’t have found us. The Indian Army was everywhere— it was the early ’90s and the region was in the middle of an insurgency. Our captors were Kashmiri rebels. They marched us toward the nearest village and put us on a small bus. EXPERTISE Ornithologist LOCATION Kashmir To keep covert, our captors kept changing our transport. They pistolwhipped a rickshaw driver for not giving up his vehicle quickly enough, took…

EXPLORE This quiz is the fifth of seven to run in 2013 to celebrate National Geographic’s 125th anniversary. The next quiz will appear in October. WOMEN AND DISCOVERY For centuries female explorers got to pursue their ambitions only in disguise or against fierce resistance. If they somehow succeeded, society often ignored them or, worse, treated them as superwomen, because that was a way, Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi wrote, “to avoid recognizing the capabilities of all women.” With that in mind, this quiz celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.…

The world’s smallest known vertebrate is the Paedophryne amauensis frog of New Guinea. The pangolin is in trouble. Tens of thousands have been traded illegally across Asia since 2000, according to estimates. It’s a trade that ranks them as one of the most trafficked mammals in Southeast Asia, above even rhinos and elephants. Single seizures in Indonesia and Vietnam have counted 15 metric tons of the house cat–size creatures, part of a massive harvesting for meat and medicine that has resulted in their disappearance from sections of their range, says Chris Shepherd of wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic. Now the trade is invading sub-Saharan Africa, the pangolin’s other home. ANSWERS FOR EXPLORERS QUIZ 1. (D) Jeanne Baret. When French botanist Philibert Commerson joined Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s 1766-1769 expedition around the…

On the ground in front of me there’s a large round pile of what looks like moist purple mud. It’s roughly the volume of a baseball cap, and it’s studded with berries and seeds—more than 50. Some of the seeds are larger than an avocado stone. I kneel down to look more closely. Putting my nose just a couple of inches away, I take a sniff. It smells of fruit mixed with a whiff of vinegar. There’s also a hint of that mouth-puckering, astringent flavor you get from strong black tea. Peculiar. But not unpleasant. What is it? It’s a bird dropping. A big bird dropping. From a big bird. I stand up and look around. I’m in the Daintree Rainforest, two hours’ drive up the coast from the seaside…

JR spent three weeks of the spring in what looked like a food truck, parked in Times Square. But instead of food, the French artist dished out oversize photographs. The subjects, a cross-smattering of New Yorkers, could either take their portraits home or paste them on the streets with JR’s preferred tools: a brush and a bucket of wheat paste. For the past 13 years JR—who won’t reveal his full name—has been plastering portraits on outdoor surfaces throughout the world, often in places where he risks arrest or deportation and where his photos can take on political meaning. In the Kibera district of Nairobi, Kenya, he made pictures of women’s faces and cut their portraits in half. The top halves were pasted on trains, the bottoms on corrugated sheets on…

1492 Christopher Columbus He never did make it to India. But no one held it against him. 1804-06 Lewis and Clark They sought a water route from the Missouri River to the Pacific. There’s no such passageway. They did document the geography, people, plants, and animals of Louisiana Purchase land. 1925 Percy Fawcett He went into Brazil’s rain forest to find the ancient city of Z and disappeared. A few years ago archaeologists discovered a lost civilization called Kuhikugu in the vicinity of Fawcett’s expedition. 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge The four-month-old suspension bridge undulated and collapsed in high winds. Wind impact had not been fully weighed during construction. Later designs included lower decks for stability. 1991 Biosphere 2 Locking eight people in a $200 million terrarium didn’t go so well:…

The Belt Parkway seawall near Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton can’t quite contain a wall of water from an October 1948 nor’easter. Surging storms have long plagued this stretch of the thoroughfare, which runs adjacent to New York Bay near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. When Hurricane Sandy slammed the region in October 2012, parts of the parkway were submerged for hours; water stood as deep as five feet in some places. The storm-ravaged seawall has since been repaired, but local residents still fear what the next big blow will bring. Flashback Archive Find all the photos at ngm.com.…