National Geographic Magazine - UK September 2024

IT’S NOT A SURPRISE that here at National Geographic, we are all in on discovery. One of our organization’s founding principles was the value of exploring and learning more about our world and sharing those discoveries with you, some-thing that is as important today as it was in the late 19th century. For even as our understanding of the planet has increased exponentially, there is still so much that we don’t know. A case in point? The ocean. Only 25 percent of the world’s seabed is mapped in high resolution, and by one estimate, more than 90 percent of the ocean’s species are still unclassified. The subject of this month’s cover story—and a new National Geographic series streaming now on Disney+—is a group of scientists who are seeking to greatly…

OCEAN “After observing the animal’s behavior, I positioned myself and CAPTURED THE CLOWNFISH in a moment of what appeared to be a kissing or whispering gesture.”DENNIS CORPUZ, Photographer WILDLIFE “The purple color attracted my attention, and when I kneeled to take a photo, I found the supertiny white fungi standing next to them and making them LOOK LIKE GIANTS in comparison.”JAVIER AZNAR, Photographer TRAVEL “Usually 500 to 1,000 people travel in each launch, but during ANY VACATION, the number doubles or triples. People take positions on the top deck and make an hours-long journey.”MOSTAFIJUR RAHMAN NASIM, Photographer CULTURE “It was magical to capture the UNEXPECTED, a moment of balance and delicate rest in the Dionysian frenzy of the traditional celebrations of the Vesuvian countryside.”ELENI ALBAROSA, Photographer…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORERS These contributors have received funding from the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Acacia Johnson, p.76 Curiosity and a camera led the Alaska-born photographer to spend seven years chronicling life in the Arctic and Antarctica. An Explorer since 2023, she returned home, to the heart of Alaska’s brown bear country, for this issue. John Stanmeyer, p.94 His 21st feature for the magazine took him back to China, where he lived from 1996 to 2003. An Explorer since 2017, he now resides in Massachusetts with two Great Danes. His next photography project will focus on soil extinction. Paul Salopek, p.94 An Explorer since 2012, this two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer set out in 2013 on a slow storytelling journey, tracing…

WHAT A STRANGE thing it must be to become a fossil. Say you live a full life for a Diplodocus dinosaur, swinging your enormously long tail across your Jurassic world for 70 or so years. Then you die—but in such extraordinary circumstances that, against all odds, your bones are buried and transformed over time into stone. Mountains rise and wear away around you. Rivers come and go. Glaciers rumble overhead. Your bones endure. Even stranger, a hundred or more million years later, volcanic activity comes to dominate the area. When the superheated fluids eventually cool and drain away, your stony bones have become green, highlighted here and there with red patches like roasted meat. And then the strangest turn of all: You return to the surface after an absence of…

BEFORE THEY TRANSFORM into moths and butterflies, caterpillars must outwit, outplay, outlast. Sam Jaffe’s images of the tubular creatures show just how: through mimicry, defensive adaptations, and partnerships with plants. The naturalist-photographer has been enamored with the insects since age four. “I used to bring them into my parents’ house,” he says. “They’d find them crawling up the walls.” While working at Harvard University, Jaffe began taking pictures of native caterpillars during his free time, then displaying the results at local galleries. The exhibitions sparked so much interest that he launched an educational nonprofit, the Caterpillar Lab, in 2013, to open our eyes to these masters of metamorphosis and inspire their protection.…

ON A WARM JUNE MORNING, A 286-FOOT private research vessel set off from the green and rocky sea cliffs of the Azores, a chain of islands jutting upward from the North Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles west of mainland Portugal. The gleaming white Ocean Xplorer, rising high above the water, resembled a modified superyacht, with a helicopter pad on the bow and a of yellow submersibles near the stern. Below the surface, the ship’s hull featured a high-resolution sonar array to map under-water terrain. The OceanXplorer had embarked on a unique mission: to tag and retrieve data from bluntnose sixgill sharks in their natural environment, an area so deep that much of their behavior remains a mystery. These prehistoric predators, whose ancestors first appeared 200 million years ago, can grow…