Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

CULTURAL HERITAGE sites are a nonrenewable resource. When they disappear, they’re gone forever, a loss akin to the extinction of species. Today architectural and archaeological heritage sites are being destroyed or imperiled at an alarming rate. They’re threatened by rising seas (Venice), pollution (the Taj Mahal), overtourism (Angkor Wat), encroaching development (the Pyramids at Giza), conflict (Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra) … And by accidents. In this issue, we explore the herculean efforts to rebuild the roof and spire of Notre Dame Cathedral, part of the Banks of the Seine UNESCO World Heritage site in Paris. Before it was wracked by fire in spring 2019, the landmark drew some 12 million visitors a year. We’ll take you behind the scenes of the rebuilding, through the work of photographer Tomas van Houtryve,…

SOME VERY OLD OBJECTS come in exquisite containers—gilded sarcophagi, carved chests—and others, in less appealing packages. The newfound beetle Triamyxa coprolithica is among the latter. A team of scientists reported discovering the species in a coprolite, aka fossilized feces. The team used synchrotron microtomography, a powerful x-ray technique, to scan an ancient dropping that the scientists had unearthed in Poland. Inside the 230-million-year-old scat, nickel size in diameter, were partial and whole specimens of the tiny beetle (above). Study lead author Martin Qvarnström says that to see 3D scans of the bugs, “it’s like they’re becoming alive in front of you.” With even some of the delicate legs and antennae intact, the remains were preserved well enough to identify the beetles as a previously unknown, now extinct species—the first time…

The fire in 1831 spared the Cathedral of Notre Dame itself. The rioters scrambled up the roof and toppled a giant iron cross; they shattered stained glass, took axes to a statue of Jesus, smashed one of the Virgin Mary. But they were really after the archbishop of Paris, who wasn’t there—and so they sacked his palace, which stood south of the church, facing the Seine River. Then they set fire to it. The palace is gone now. A 250-foot-tall construction crane stands on that spot. There’s a drawing of the scene that night, February 14, 1831, viewed from the Quai de Montebello, across the Seine. It was made by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc—the man who, 13 years later, would undertake a 20-year restoration of the cathedral. Viollet-le-Duc was only 17 when he…

FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO A Washington, D.C.–based photographer focused on animals and their relationships to humans WHERE Ranthambore National Park in northern India WHAT A Canon EOS-1D X with a 100-400mm lens “Would you want to be that tiger?” asks Aigner. While in India in 2018, she witnessed a scene that plays out in national parks around the world: wildlife tour guides, sometimes driven by big tips, jockeying to get their clients the best views. This results in racing safari trucks that startle—and occasionally harm—tigers and other species. People who don’t adhere to tourism rules contribute to the problem. But so do those—herself included, says Aigner—who pursue wild animal photography. National Geographic is the most popular brand on Instagram, with more than 258 million followers. This page showcases images from…

Just like us, forests move a bit faster when there’s coffee on hand. An experiment in a Costa Rican rainforest covered deforested land with pulp that’s a by-product of the coffeemaking process, to see how it affected forest regrowth. After two years, the pulp-covered forest plots were doing much better than untreated ones—giving coffee producers a new, sustainable alternative to dumping their waste.…

NOTHING ABOUT CICHLIDS is ordinary. In Lake Tanganyika alone, at the divide between Central and East Africa, roughly 250 species evolved from a single ancestor over 9.7 million years. Some are the size of a preschooler; others, no longer than a pinkie finger. Some spend their lives searching for and defending the perfect shell or building elaborate sand stages on which to attract a mate. Others thrive in harems. Many are doting parents to their young fish—though sometimes they eat their own eggs. In a clear example of explosive diversification, cichlids (SICK-lids) have adapted to fit almost every niche in the lake. The majority of cichlids there are found nowhere else, and they offer scientists clues to unlocking the secrets of evolution. It’s an urgent endeavor: Animals are going extinct…

ON A MONDAY MORNING IN LATE OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR, SUDAN’S LATEST REVOLUTION WAS CRUMBLING. It had been just two and a half years since the 30-year Islamist dictatorship of Omar al Bashir fell in April 2019. The nation’s military-civilian Sovereign Council was steering away from the legacy of the accused war criminal and three dark decades of repression, genocide, international sanctions, and the secession of South Sudan. But around noon on October 25, 2021, just weeks ahead of a planned transition to civilian control, the future of the African nation took another turn. The chair of the Sovereign Council, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al Burhan, dissolved the government and put the civilian prime minister under house arrest. The general called it a state of emergency, but the Sudanese people…

BEHIND THE SCENE Before entering the South China Sea, the Mekong River fans out into a network of waterways. During flood season (June to November), women steer long-tail boats to harvest water lilies. Wading into waist-deep water, they rinse and bundle the plants for sale at markets and to restaurants. These women learned boating from their mothers and grandmothers, says Khánh Phan, who captured the image by drone. She likens the circle of lilies to one big blossom on which “the women are like bees.” THE LIFE AQUATIC Water lilies are among more than 20,000 species of plants that grow in the Mekong. The world’s second most biodiverse river, after the Amazon, supports animals such as the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin, the hairy-nosed otter, and the giant freshwater stingray. Human life…

I TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH through the window of an abandoned home in a village in western Uganda. As I watched, one wild chimpanzee entered the yard, then another. Though they stared hard at the windows, I knew they couldn’t see me behind the mirrored glass—and I was glad. During past fieldwork, I’d been around scores of wild chimpanzees and shadowed them at close range. Yet until this photo assignment in 2017, I had never tried to hide from chimps. I had never even imagined writing such a sentence. That was before I met the Semata family and saw firsthand how depleted land and forest, and scarce food and crops, can unleash competition between primates, those inside houses and those outside. FOR AS LONG AS I CAN remember, I’ve felt at…

SWALLOWED BY THE EMPTY BLACK NIGHT, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa tried to focus the shaky orb of his headlamp on his next few steps, but the cold overwhelmed his thoughts. Clad in a bulky down suit, with another down jacket underneath, plus two layers of long underwear and breathing bottled oxygen, he should have been OK. But in all the peaks he’d summited, all the blizzards and frigid gales he’d weathered, he’d never felt temperatures quite like this—a piercing, otherworldly cold. He could sense his body shutting down. His left side bore the brunt of a stout wind, with each gust sending icy tendrils slicing through everything he wore. But his right foot was especially worrisome. It had tingled, then burned, and finally ebbed into numbness, a precursor to serious frostbite. That,…