Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2021 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

WHO HASN’T PAUSED to appreciate a beautiful sunset? Or listen to the wind rustling through the trees? By the sea, there are mesmerizing tides and a salt-air scent; in the sky, dazzling formations of birds, and endless stars. Behind all those experiences are the natural forces that power our planet. They give rise to the sounds, smells, and sights we perceive; the life that swarms around us, moving at every speed. Those phenomena are the focus of this special issue and of a six-part National Geographic television series, starring Will Smith and available on Disney+. In print and broadcast media and on digital and social platforms, this project shares one title: Welcome to Earth. That’s an oddly appropriate greeting, addressing us as if we’re strangers to a place we think…

LACKING SHARP EYESIGHT, spiders use their legs to feel vibrations in their webs. A web’s silken strands have different lengths and tensions and, as a result, different frequencies. The resident spider is attuned to those frequencies to detect prey, potential mates, or threats. Now, a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aims to convey a bit of that Spidey sense to humans. With 3D laser imaging based on cobweb cross sections (above), the MIT team mapped the web of a tropical tent-web spider. To the strands, the scientists assigned musical tones audible to humans. They also built a virtual reality interface that lets users “play” the spiderweb like an eerie-sounding stringed instrument. “We’re trying to give the spider a voice,” said MIT’s Markus Buehler—and, maybe someday, communicate…

FROM LOCATIONS on the ocean floor, seismographs relay data to scientists on land who monitor earthquakes. Besides picking up seismic activity, the instruments often capture the songs of nearby whales. Typically, researchers delete those whale sounds during analysis. But scientist Václav Kuna, then with Oregon State University, hit upon a new application as he listened to the calls of a fin whale, which can be as loud as a large ship and detected up to 600 miles away. Seismographs record the initial signal from a fin whale and then an echo after the sound has penetrated the seafloor, gone as deep as one and a half miles beneath the floor, and bounced back upward. By studying the echoes’ frequencies, scientists can gain a type of low-resolution ultrasound of the Earth’s…

The swarm of more than a million migrating wildebeests in the greater Serengeti ecosystem is a breathtaking scene—and one that is crucial to wildlife throughout East Africa. CHARLIE HAMILTON JAMES photographs this timeless journey, while PAULA KAHUMBU, PETER GWIN, and YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR write of the personal, ecological, and cultural issues that shape a region whose delicate balance of nature faces increasing threats. AN INTRICATE WEB OF LIFE BY PAULA KAHUMBU The Kenyan scientist says the Serengeti and its wildlife are symbols of pride, but she worries about what could be lost. PAGE 46 THE WILDEBEEST, AN UNLIKELY KING BY PETER GWIN The king of the Serengeti isn’t the lion. It’s the awkward-looking wildebeest, an antelope whose migration fuels a complex ecosystem. PAGE 58 PHOTO ESSAY: GUARDIANS OF THE LAND…

RICH TRADITIONS AND CHALLENGES OVER RESOURCES SHAPE DAILY LIFE. BOYS LEARN EARLY TO PROTECT THE HERD AND LIVE IN HARMONY WITH THE LAND. MAKING A LEAP FROM VILLAGE LIFE TO CAREERS IN TOURISM, YOUNG MAASAI TRAIN FOR THE FUTURE WHILE KEEPING TRADITIONAL WAYS. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE NEED MORE LAND, FUEL, AND FOOD? FORESTS GET TURNED INTO CHARCOAL, AND ANIMALS GET SNARED BY POACHERS.…

After peaking in 1977, the wildebeest population stabilized at a level the food supply could support, about 1.3 million animals. Their numbers can still fluctuate with variations in annual rainfall. POPULATION CONTROL Serengeti animals under 330 pounds typically die from predation; those heavier than that threshold, from lack of food. Wildebeests, midsize, attempt to avoid both threats by migrating.…

RECENTLY I EMBARKED on a journey into the Serengeti. It wasn’t the Serengeti you might envision, not the postcard vistas of rolling, yellow-grass savannas punctuated by umbrella thorn acacias. And I didn’t stay in a luxury tented camp or join the armies of tourist vans swarming around lion kills. Instead, I traveled to Loita, a part of the greater Serengeti ecosystem that doesn’t appear on the standard itinerary—a hidden Serengeti, if you will, one that includes a lush mountain wilderness rising more than a mile above sea level. It’s about a 150-mile drive southwest from Nairobi and overlooks the world-famous Masai Mara National Reserve. Yet it’s a place most visitors to Kenya don’t know exists. My plan was to make my way up into the heart of this green fortress…

IN A LAND OF PLENTY AND PAUCITY, THE NEXT MEAL IS EVERYTHING. WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN IN THE MASAI MARA, IT’S TIME TO GO HUNTING. THEY’VE GROWN UP WITH CARS AROUND THEM AT EVERY TURN, BUT ALL THE GAWKING HASN’T SLOWED DOWN THESE CHEETAHS. FEELING THE SQUEEZE FROM SHRINKING HABITATS AND CLIMATE CHANGE, ANIMALS BIG AND SMALL STRUGGLE IN THIS FRAGILE ECOSYSTEM. THE STAKES ARE HIGH FOR ANIMALS AND HUMANS IN A LANDSCAPE LIKE NO OTHER.…

WELCOME TO EARTH sounds like a greeting to aliens—which most of us might as well be, considering how little we know about our planet. Actor Will Smith sets out to explore its far reaches in Welcome to Earth, a Disney+ original series from National Geographic. Three years ago, Smith led another National Geographic series about Earth’s wonders, One Strange Rock. This time the host leaves the studio to venture into some of the planet’s most extreme environments—deep seas, deserts, glaciers—with a diverse group of researchers and adventurers. Over six episodes, Smith proves game for anything, even if initially wary. “My grandmother used to say all the best things in life lived on the other side of fear,” he says. “I sure hope Gigi was right.” Although uncomfortable in water, Smith…

The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has been a funder since 2012 of the Photo Ark project founded by National Geographic Explorer Joel Sartore. An author, a teacher, and a conservationist as well as a photographer, Sartore created the 25-year project—now the National Geographic Photo Ark—to use images to inspire people to help save threatened species and habitat. Parts of this photo essay are drawn from Sartore’s new book, Photo Ark Wonders, on sale at shopdisney.com.…

THE REGENT HONEYEATER (Anthochaera phrygia) is a critically endangered songbird in southeastern Australia. Only a few hundred are left, and some young males aren’t around older ones enough to learn their songs. A research team based in Canberra recently reported that 27 percent of male honeyeaters were singing flawed renditions, while 12 percent didn’t know their mating calls at all and had adopted those of other species—not what female honeyeaters want to hear. The team has exposed captive young birds to older birds’ recorded songs—and even to wild-caught older males—in hopes that this music therapy will teach youngsters the right tunes to preserve the species. It’s a reminder that populations and cultures rise and fall together, like the notes of a song.…

A VOLCANO’S COLORS can be felt as much as seen. At the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland, about 19 miles from the capital, Reykjavík, the hottest lava radiates whitish yellow but cools to orange, red, and eventually midnight black. This “extraordinary dynamic range” is one of many colorful phenomena that photographer Stephen Wilkes observes in his May image of the eruption, at left. The image shows the landscape transition from day to night in a single frame. Wilkes created the effect by compiling 70 of the 1,123 photographs he took from a single vantage point over 21 hours. The composition starts on the lower right with a photo taken at 1:54 p.m. and progresses diagonally to the upper left, blending together Wilkes’s favorite moments. “I’m re-creating my memory, in many ways,”…

BOB MCNABB IS one of the keepers of a number that even he can’t fully comprehend: 267 billion metric tons of water. To explain a quantity of this size, the Ulster University glaciologist must use analogies. Depending on how you look at it, 267 billion metric tons of water is roughly half the volume of Lake Erie. Or six months of discharge from the Mississippi River. Or all the water in a 10-foot-deep swimming pool that’s the size of Ireland. “It’s really hard to grok,” McNabb tells me. If we could imagine all that water—a pool as big as Ireland—could we also imagine that much ice melting every year for the past two decades? Ultimately the enormous number that McNabb helped derive is a speed: the speed at which Earth’s…

THE LINE APPEARED on the horizon as a gray thread on a pale green quilt, but as the plane flew closer, it became a column of a few hundred animals, winding across the plain. “Wildebeest,” Charlie shouted over the drone of the engine. “It’s a small group.” We were north of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, and since it was March, we knew the wildebeests would soon be moving northwest, up through Serengeti National Park and into Kenya. And there they were, in a perfectly straight, nose-to-tail convoy. I could make out their curved horns and long heads nodding up and down as they trudged through the morning sun. Several calves pressed against their mothers’ flanks. For thousands of years, wildebeest herds have journeyed through the greater Serengeti ecosystem in a clockwise…

More fences, more tourist traffic, more farms siphoning off water: These factors aren’t the only reasons wildebeests are visiting Kenya’s Masai Mara less often and staying a shorter time. But such human-made changes are undeniably having an impact. This region is where ungulates normally wait out the dry-season months, from July to October. Many then chase the rains southward back into Tanzania, while a smaller, resident group moves east to the Loita Plains—a local migration experts fear may be going extinct. SOURCES: JARED STABACH AND LACEY HUGHEY, SMITHSONIAN CONSERVATION BIOLOGY INSTITUTE; JAKE WALL, MARA ELEPHANT PROJECT; GRANT HOPCRAFT AND THOMAS MORRISON, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW; DANIEL SOPIA, MAASAI MARA WILDLIFE CONSERVANCIES ASSOCIATION; AARHUS UNIVERSITY…

TV HOT ZONE: ANTHRAX Just weeks after September 11, 2001, lethal anthrax was mailed to lawmakers and media outlets in U.S. cities. The FBI and scientists track the culprit in National Geographic’s The Hot Zone: Anthrax, which premieres November 28-30 and will stream on Hulu. TV Becoming Cousteau Adventurer, filmmaker, unlikely celebrity: Jacques-Yves Cousteau helped teach us to conserve and explore the ocean. Becoming Cousteau, from National Geographic Documentary Films, premieres November 24 on Disney+. TV CAVE-DIVING RESCUE The story of the high-stakes mission to save 12 boys and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand is told with never before seen material and exclusive interviews in The Rescue, premiering December 3 on Disney+. BOOKS RISING ABOVE BARRIERS Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cottman tells the inspiring account of the…