Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

SCIENCE TELLS US unequivocally that the world is getting hotter: The past six years have been the warmest on record. Each of us may note this differently. For me, it’s the birds that no longer migrate south in the winter; I see them all year long now. And why in the world is the forsythia blooming in January? Ultimately, to solve global warming, we must drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Part one of this month’s cover story package addresses that challenge. It looks at heat and how humans—who evolved during the past 10,000 years in an average air temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit—must adapt to a steamy new reality but also work to mitigate it. Part two of the package explores a low-tech, immediate solution to heat: shade. We’re well…

The United States has pledged to help the world plant and protect a trillion trees by 2030, but the plan has hit a snag: There aren’t enough seedlings to grow into trees for planting—not by a long shot, a new study says. At least three billion tiny trees a year are needed to plant available acres—a 130 percent planting jump that would add tens of billions of dollars in costs for seed collection, infrastructure, and more. The new trees also would need long-term monitoring to ensure they survive pressures such as pests, disease, drought, and fire. Environmentalists say that planting that many trees, and conserving mature ones, is vital to remove planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping cool a warming future.…

SOMETIMES THE BEST IMAGES are not the ones we plan for. Back in 2003 I was a marine biologist studying kelp forests for my Ph.D., but really I was rushing headlong into becoming a photographer. I’d become convinced that I could make a bigger difference in conservation with images than with research. So instead of revising thesis chapters, I began spending most of my time making pictures. Increasingly those photographs were of great white sharks, a newfound obsession fueled by my friendship with biologist Michael Scholl of the White Shark Trust. Great whites were big, bold, charismatic—and in dire need of an image makeover. One summer day Michael alerted me to a puzzlingly large number of sharks near South Africa’s southern tip: nearly a dozen great whites concentrated along a…

Trees become sparser and neighborhoods hotter as you drive from north to south along Vermont Avenue. Over about six miles, the road passes through areas that show the enduring effects of housing discrimination through redlining, which ranked areas from A (“green,” or most suitable for investment) to D (“red,” or least suitable). At the north end, in Los Feliz, spreading fig trees line the avenue. In this and other affluent grade A areas, a 1939 map notes, deed restrictions left ownership of some houses “limited in perpetuity to Caucasian” buyers. Grade B was still “reasonably homogenous.” But grade C was marked by “subversive racial elements” and potential “infiltration” from redlined grade D areas—such as the one near I-10 in Pico-Union. Today, trees are all but absent there, and average temperatures…

THREE MILES UP IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES, LA RINCONADA IS THE HIGHEST SETTLEMENT ON THE PLANET, a place whose bleak existence depends on the high price of its most coveted resource—gold. As the price of the precious element more than quintupled over the past two decades, what was once a small town in the shadow of snowcapped Mount Ananea has transformed into an uncontrolled sprawl of corrugated metal shacks packed around artisanal mine entrances and a refuse-choked lake. The biting cold and lack of oxygen at 16,732 feet above sea level leave even the locals gasping for breath, and it smells like what it is—a settlement with a transient population of some 30,000 to 50,000 people and no garbage collection or sewer system. Fatal accidents in the labyrinth of mines…

One of our most popular Instagram images ever (left) is this 2018 portrait of an ocelot cub named Keanu that had been rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Peru. At a rehabilitation center in the Peruvian Amazon, ecologists Samantha Zwicker and Harry Turner helped the growing ocelot transition from care in an enclosure to life in the wild. One day in 2020, Zwicker (above) found Keanu with a puncture wound on his leg, likely from an encounter with a caiman or another ocelot. Zwicker cleaned the wound and nursed Keanu back to health. He returned to the wild a month later and hasn’t been seen since. This page showcases images from National Geographic’s Instagram accounts—the most popular brand on Instagram. Join more than 230 million followers: @natgeo, @natgeotravel, @natgeointhefield,…

TO THE TOP This vertiginous ladder makes up a section of the Grosser Donnerkogel via ferrata. Italian for “iron way,” a via ferrata is a path built into a mountain’s rock face, with fixtures, such as metal rungs, that follow a secured cable. The term gained popularity after mountaineers appropriated the network built across Italy’s Dolomites during World War I to assist soldiers navigating high altitudes. Now these paths allow climbers without advanced technical skills to access exceptional vistas and summits. ROOTS OF THE ROUTE The first via ferrata was installed in 1843 on Austria’s Hoher Dachstein mountain by geographer and alpinist Friedrich Simony. Today’s paths, which have climbers clip into the cable using two safety carabiners, draw outdoor adventurers. Of the Donnerkogel route, which typically takes about three hours…

THE HUMAN BODY HAS EVOLVED to shed heat in two main ways: Blood vessels swell, carrying heat to the skin so it can radiate away, and sweat erupts onto the skin, cooling it by evaporation. When those mechanisms fail, we die. It sounds straightforward; it’s actually a complex, cascading collapse. As a heatstroke victim’s internal temperature rises, the heart and lungs work ever harder to keep dilated vessels full. A point comes when the heart cannot keep up. Blood pressure drops, inducing dizziness, stumbling, and the slurring of speech. Salt levels decline and muscles cramp. Confused, even delirious, many victims don’t realize they need immediate help. With blood rushing to overheated skin, organs receive less flow, triggering a range of reactions that break down cells. Some victims succumb with an…

MIGUEL VARGAS VIVIDLY REMEMBERS when he first understood the power of shade. He was in middle school, sprinting up and down a scrubby soccer field in Huntington Park, a small city laced with train tracks and high-voltage transmission lines just south of the Los Angeles skyline. He ran so hard in the battering sun that he overheated. His vision went fuzzy. His heart pounded. In a daze he stumbled toward a towering red pine near the southwest corner of the field—the biggest and almost the only tree in sight. In that shelter, Vargas’s dizziness receded. His heart rate mellowed. He returned to himself, revived by the deep, cool shadow. That simple blessing, he learned later when he took a job planting trees, is abundant elsewhere in L.A., primarily in rich,…

La Rinconada is the world’s highest settlement. At 16,732 feet—almost as high as Base Camp at Mount Everest—La Rinconada’s meager oxygen levels and treacherous terrain make life difficult. Yet La Rinconada has grown rapidly in the past three decades as gold prices have risen. Pollution from gold processing settles on glaciers that form the Andean water system’s headwaters, sending toxic chemicals such as mercury far downstream. SCALE VARIES IN THIS PERSPECTIVE. THE DISTANCE FROM LAKE RINCONADA TO SLEEPING BEAUTY GLACIER IS TWO MILES. SOREN WALLJASPER, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: PLANET LABS INC, AIRBUS DS GEO, OPENSTREETMAP…

FEWER PLACES ARE LESS WELCOMING THAN A GARBAGE DUMP ON A FRIGID NIGHT. BUT THAT’S WHERE paleontologist Josep Robles found himself in December 2019, on the hunt for rare clues to human evolutionary history. For much of the past couple of months, he’d spent several nights a week at the Abocador de Can Mata, the largest active landfill in the Catalonia region of Spain. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, excavators had been plunging their metal claws into the earth in a rush to create yet another deep pit to hold trash from Barcelona and its surroundings. Robles was one of eight paleontologists on rotation to keep a close eye on the rocky tons of tawny dirt displaced by the diggers. During the day, the sickly sweet aroma…

BORN AND RAISED in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, Glenn SooHoo has witnessed the growth, decline, and revitalization of his neighborhood for 50 years. In the past year and a half, this enclave—and others like it across North America—has been in crisis, buffeted by the twin traumas of xenophobia and a public health emergency. “The virus is hampering business and the tourist industry,” says SooHoo, owner of Phoenix Imports. “The virus didn’t have anything to do with Chinatown, but [with] it being associated as an Asian thing by [then President Donald Trump], people just got that phobia about it.” As historic Chinatowns struggle during the pandemic, it’s worth looking at why residents—and visitors—flocked to them in the first place. Chinatowns have been in the United States for more than 170 years. The…

* The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies future climate scenarios, called representative concentration pathways (RCPs), ranging from worst-case scenario, RCP 8.5, to best, RCP 2.6. Data here use RCP 4.5 for 2040–2059 projections. How to read this chart The beginning of a city’s line shows its average temperature and mortality cost in 2019; the endpoint of its line shows its projected temperature and mortality cost in 2050. JASON TREAT, CHRISTINE FELLENZ, AND EVE CONANT, NGM STAFF SOURCE: CLIMATE IMPACT LAB…

Outside the health clinic in Biliqo, a hot wind whips up the dirt. It tugs at the shreds of material caught in the thornbushes, whirls discarded plastic bottles across the ground, and chases the tail of Madina Kalo’s indigo hijab as she stands in the clinic’s rough wooden doorway. It’s midyear—northern Kenya’s main dry season—and the land is parched by the sun, the color palette bright and blown out, like an overexposed photograph. Kalo, dressed in her white nurse’s tunic and surgical mask, squints, then steps back into the cool of the clinic. She sees about 30 people a day, most of them pastoralist herders reporting routine ailments such as respiratory infections, malaria, and diarrhea. When cases are serious, Kalo refers patients to the town of Isiolo, a fivehour journey…

Some of Europe’s richest fossil deposits—as well as the Can Mata landfill—can be found in Catalonia’s Vallès-Penedès Basin. For millions of years during the Miocene epoch, an active fault caused the basin to sink steadily, providing a constantly growing reservoir for animal remains. Sediment flowing off the Prelittoral Range then buried the bones in mud and silt, preserving them for millennia. FIRST FINDS The region’s once forested, humid conditions were ideal for ancient primates. Four species (shown here in bold) were first discovered in Can Mata, and as excavations continue, scientists expect to find more primates. ROSEMARY WARDLEY AND DIANA MARQUES, NGM STAFF SOURCES: DAVID M. ALBA AND ISAAC CASANOVAS-VILAR, CATALAN INSTITUTE OF PALEONTOLOGY MIQUEL CRUSAFONT; EU-DEM…