National Geographic Magazine - UK August 2023

WHEN I WAS A BOY, I couldn’t read enough about polar exploration. Robert Peary, Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Ernest Shackleton—the tales of these explorers and their crews, battling the elements and the odds in the Arctic and Antarctic, were filled with such drama and pathos that I was transfixed. And I’m still an enthusiast, not only of the stories but also of the regions they explored, places both captivating in their beauty and of critical importance for what they tell us about the ways climate change is affecting our planet. This issue’s cover story is its own odyssey of Arctic exploration. In the mid-19th century, Sir John Franklin led a crew of 128 men from England in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route through Arctic waters linking…

Kennedi Carter A resident of Durham, North Carolina, Carter specializes in showcasing the wide and diverse range of Black experiences, from adversity and hardship to love and community. Her photography has appeared in British Vogue, the New York Times, and Essence, among other outlets. Page 76 Philip Cheung Photographs made by Cheung have been exhibited at several museums and featured in publications such as Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and Time. Based in Los Angeles, he’s continuing to develop his project about the Chinese migrant laborers who worked on the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1800s. Page 88 Christopher Gregory Rivera A Puerto Rican photographer who makes his home in New York City, Gregory Rivera illuminates lesser known stories of the past to facilitate understanding of the present. His images of…

Mark Synnott The best-selling author, longtime adventurer, mountain guide, and pioneering climber of remote rock walls has been an Explorer since 1999. In National Geographic’s January issue, Synnott wrote about efforts to protect antiquities in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. For this month’s cover story, he took a harrowing journey through Arctic waters. At the end of the expedition, he left his sailboat, Polar Sun, in Nome, Alaska. How will he return it to his home in Maine? “I’m definitely not going back through the Northwest Passage,” he vows. Page 34 Muhammed Muheisen A photographer who’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice, Muheisen also established the Dutch nonprofit Everyday Refugees Foundation. He’s been documenting the consequences of refugee crises around the world for more than a decade, and he became an…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

LIKE THE VAST EXPANSES they constitute, drops of seawater teem with life. Scientists estimate that some may contain as many as a million organisms, most too small to see with the naked eye. But put a drop under a microscope, and you will likely find free-swimming fish larvae, crawling copepods, and peculiar protists. While these minuscule creatures and their water worlds are overlooked by most of us, Spanish photographer Angel Fitor has made them his muse. As a teenager, Fitor spent much of his time peering into the fish tank at his childhood home in Alicante. “My relationship with the underwater world started actually behind the glass,” he says. Now 50 and also a self-taught naturalist, he’s turned his passion into a career. “I’m working behind the glass, only a…

IF A SCIENTIST SEES A UNICORN, she’ll probably want to see more than one before telling the world about her discovery. But sometimes one unicorn is enough. In 2007 an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer reported finding a spectacular new kind of celestial event. It was a brief bolt of energy so powerful it could reach Earth from a galaxy billions of light-years away. He called his discovery a fast radio burst (FRB), because it lasted less than a second and it was only detectable using a radio telescope. It was a remarkable find. If real, FRBs could be used to measure the amount of matter in the space between galaxies. I likened them to a kind of dipstick for the density of the universe—a turn of phrase my editor loved that…