Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

Jaipur, India. Known as “The Pink City,” the vibrant, dustypink and terracotta-hued capital of Rajasthan is a sensory overload of color—red spices in copper pots and strings of rich yellow marigolds adorn green-tiled city gates. But this celebration of color is more than just aesthetic—it is woven into the very fabric of this energetic city. Its bustling bazaars and vibrant palace rooms have attracted visitors and residents since the town was founded in 1727. A century and a half later, in 1876, it was painted its iconic pink to welcome Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert—pink being the traditional color of welcome and hospitality. A year later, the Queen of Jaipur so loved the rose-hued city that a law was passed that any future buildings in the city be…

DIGITAL SITE MODELING In Niger, Sereno and his team relied on tools that stitch together photos to make spatially accurate 3D site models. Less manual mapping meant more time for digging. 1. DISCOVERY Day 1 The team found fossils on a prior trip to the Irhazer Plain, preserving them from erosion with a plaster cap. In 2022, they returned to excavate the mysterious animals. 2. MAPPING WITH PHOTOS Hundreds of photos from drones and cameras recorded the excavation’s progress. Anchor points common to the image photogrammetry software to connect them. 3. EXCAVATION The team carefully brushed and chipped away rock and dirt surrounding fossils, using hand and power tools. Fossil measurements and positioning data could be gleaned from the digital models. 4. FOSSIL PREPARATION Day 20 Fossils freed from most…

IN THE EARLY 1980S, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archivist Volkmar Wentzel was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking: a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the size of postcards, displaying color images captured in the early 20th century. Many were deteriorating, their once crisp scenes speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal by time and neglect. They were autochromes, the products of a turn-of-the-20thcentury race to capture the world in all its color. And now the race was on to preserve them, even as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in 1907 by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière, autochrome technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light-sensitive silver emulsion covered with…

FOR THOUSANDS of years, the Imazighen—also known as Berbers—in southern Tunisia have built their homes by chiseling into the low-slung sandstone hillsides that run through the wide plains of the Sahara. These cave shelters offered a cool escape from the searing heat and harsh desert winds. Then the national government suggested there might be a better way to live. It all started when Tunisia gained independence from France in 1956 and the new president, Habib Bourguiba, began pushing for the country to modernize, which meant moving cave-dwelling Imazighen into government-built housing aboveground. The people were promised cheap running water and electricity, though many who relocated soon found that wasn’t the case. “They lied to us,” says Slimen Ben Massoud, a 72-year-old who was born in a cave but moved to…

THE VOLCANIC landscape of Cappadocia, in central Turkey, has eroded over millennia to form mountain ridges, sandstone valleys, and rows of Gaudiesque cones that the tourism industry likes to call fairy chimneys. Over 4,000 years, humans, too, have carved the porous rock, excavating a warren of caves, tunnels, and passages. Among 205,000 acres of archaeological sites in the region, there are dozens of abandoned underground cities. One, Kaymaklı, is over 4,000 years old and extends eight stories belowground, complete with stables and wine cellars. Another, Derinkuyu, was vast enough to have housed 20,000 people at once. While these larger archaeological treasures haven’t been occupied in more than a hundred years, many of the individual homes carved into the area’s rocks are still in use. Oktay, 72, and Hanife Torun, 64,…

FOR DECADES, Middleton Island was little more than a forgotten outpost—a flat sliver of land battered by the restless winds and waters of the Gulf of Alaska. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Air Force built a radar station on the remote island to scan the skies for Soviet bombers during the Cold War. The facility was shuttered just seven years later, its squat buildings and steel towers left to rust. Today the qualities that made Middleton perfect for military surveillance—isolation, bird’s-eye views, and the absence of human distraction—have made it ideal for a new kind of outpost. Amid the dilapidated Air Force structures, small crews of scientists arrive each summer by air taxi to turn this ghostly military complex into a frontline research station for seabird science. Where radar…

TELEVISION WHEN JAWS HIT theaters 50 years ago this summer, film-maker Laurent Bouzereau was a 13-year-old budding cinephile in suburban Paris whose obsession with Les dents de la mer (“the teeth of the sea”) set him on his career path. “My bedroom was basically wall-to-wall Jaws,” says Bouzereau, whose new National Geographic documentary, Jaws @50: The Definitive Inside Story, features a wide range of voices weighing in on the film’s impact. We hear from Steven Spielberg, of course. Also Hollywood types, from director Guillermo del Toro to actress Emily Blunt, and locals on Martha’s Vineyard, where the movie was shot. Most surprising are the scientists who say they see Jaws driving interest in sharks and marine habitats today, years after provoking trophy hunts. “That this movie can still be celebrated and…

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. Learn more about the Society’s support of Explorers at natgeo.com/impact. Tamara Merino, p.74 Based in Santiago, Chile, Merino photographed cave-dwelling communities in seven countries, including Lesotho and Tunisia, for this issue’s feature on what she calls “humanity’s first homes.” Her work has also appeared in Time, the New York Times, and Libération. Paul Sereno, p.14 An Explorer since 1983, paleontologist Sereno writes this month about the most ambitious expedition of his career, in Niger’s Sahara. He is a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and runs the university’s Fossil Lab, a research and education center. Paul Salopek, p.40 A Pulitzer-winning reporter…

DO YOU KNOW how to run fast?” asked a man I’ll call Park. He was driving us carefully through dusk, well below the speed limit, from Seoul toward the infamous Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the heavily mined frontier between South and North Korea. It was a warm summer evening. Park, a North Korean defector who allowed me to tag along provided he could use an assumed name, was keeping a wary eye on his rearview mirror for a police tail. The only vehicle shadowing us, thankfully, was a nondescript pickup truck steered by one of Park’s helpers. It was lugging, under a blue tarp, enough steel canisters of hydrogen to blow up a large house. Park’s two-vehicle convoy wasn’t bound for some mission of terror. Instead, trundling past 7-Eleven convenience stores,…

A CENTURY AGO the Madagascar pochard thrived in its only known habitat: Lake Alaotra, the country’s largest lake. But over time many of the bug-filled marshes surrounding the shallow lake were converted to cropland, and the duck started to die off. The last flock was recorded in 1960. A small group of scientists spent decades looking for the pochard by hiking through torrential rains, paddling across wetlands in dugout canoes, and even putting ads in the community paper—with little to show for it. By the mid-1990s the duck, known by locals as fotsimaso, or white eye, for the bright eyes of mature males, was thought to have gone extinct. But in 2006 Malagasy biologist and National Geographic Explorer Lily-Arison Rene de Roland chanced upon 13 of the pochards on a…

THE CITY of Petra was carved into the sandstone cliffs and canyons of the Jordanian desert over 2,000 years ago as the dazzling trading capital of the Nabataean empire. But for more than two centuries, Bedouin have called its labyrinth of catacombs, passageways, and chambers their home. It was a bucolic and pastoral existence—the slopes below the Royal Tomb were used for agriculture, and the tribe herded their goats through the long canyon into the city. It was the perfect spot until the 1970s, when the Jordanian government made plans to convert the site into an archaeological tourist attraction. King Hussein bin Talal brokered an agreement for the 140 Bedouin families to leave, and officials built towns nearby to house them. “Essentially, [it] was justified as preservation of the monuments, as…

THE WORLD PRODUCES a tremendous amount of data: some 400 billion gigabytes every day, a number that’s increasing rapidly. Most of it is stored in the cloud, which is a pretty word for a network of millions of computer servers in air-conditioned warehouses that transfer and save our data to cassettes of magnetic tape. But the cloud demands huge amounts of space and energy and has heavy impacts on the environment. The magnetic tape also degrades, needs to be recopied, and requires frequent updates. Enter DNA, the tiny molecule that stores our genetic information. Scientists have come up with a way to mimic DNA, artificially, to meet our escalating data storage needs. The secret lies in translating binary code (of ones and zeros) into the chemical bases that make up…

For more than a hundred years, scholars thought the small Roman fort on Blöskopf ridge was a late second-century facility, but new discoveries have corrected the record. Archaeologists recently uncovered evidence that identified the site as a mid-first-century security outpost for the mine, housing between 12 and 40 men. TERRAIN BARRIER A 1,300-foot-long wall extended north and south of the outpost to prevent assaults from the east. DITCHES AND SPIKES Two V-shaped defensive trenches protected the outpost. The inner, larger one, some 15 feet wide and six feet deep, was lined with sharp wooden spikes that archaeologists named pila fossata. Before their discovery at Blöskopf, none had ever been found in situ. OUTPOST Built in different phases over several years, the Blöskopf fortlet featured sturdy stone walls and half-timber construction,…

OCEANS “I saw this pool and was surprised to see it so FULL OF COLORS. And such a number of seaweeds in the same pool. It was quite incredible.”FORTUNATO GATTO, photographer SPORT “Enos has a youthful spirit, despite his 81 years. But behind the horseplay is a man who taught me that the work of a FREEDOM FIGHTER is never over.”KARABO MOOKI, photographer RITUAL “All the young nuns do KUNG FU. It’s not aggressive. It’s graceful and fast, and every now and then, they stop and hold for a moment, almost perfectly in sync.”NADJA WOHLLEBEN, photographer LIVELIHOODS “People really RESPECT him. He knows a lot, not because he’s studied something, but because he knows nature.”LUISA DÖRR, photographer…

AS THE SAHARAN SUN ROSE ON MY WAYLAID TEAM, one morning in September 2022, it seemed to burn with particular intensity. For nearly three weeks we’d been holed up in a mud-walled compound in the oasis town of Agadez, in central Niger, stalled because of officials’ insistence on assembling for us a large armed escort. Now, as dawn broke, we were finally ready to embark: Nearly a hundred people packed into 15 vehicles, a motley caravan of SUVs, pickups, and one large dump truck, all strapped with sand ladders and spare tires, heading out on an extraordinary desert dinosaur hunt—without question, the most ambitious of my career. Among our number were Tuareg guides and drivers, a film crew, 64 armed guards, and my paleo dream team of 20 students and freshly…

THE SOUND OF A GUNSHOT ALERTED THE RANGERS THAT SOMETHING WAS AMISS. Advancing through the forest in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand, they arrived at a campsite littered with evidence of murder. The blood-soaked carcass of a barking deer lay on the ground. Other bits of victims—a kalij pheasant and a rare black leopard—oozed on a cutting board and simmered in a soup kettle. The rangers arrested four people at the scene on suspicion of poaching protected species and violating gun laws, crimes punishable by a maximum 10-year jail term. But there was a complication. The leader of the hunting group was Premchai Karnasuta, a construction-empire tycoon and one of Thailand’s most prominent and powerful men. Karnasuta professed his innocence, apparently trusting that his well-paid lawyers…

NEARLY A DECADE AGO, documentary photographer and National Geographic Explorer Tamara Merino was driving a camper van through the hot and seemingly desolate expanse of Australia’s Simpson Desert, when one of her tires blew out. The nearly 70,000 square miles of barren red dunes are not a place you want to have car trouble; summer temperatures push into the 120s, and water is scarce. Merino coaxed her van down the road and began to see signs of a town. But there was no one in sight, and the few buildings felt abandoned. Wandering the streets, she spotted a rudimentary metal cross on a hilltop. She scrambled up to take a look and found that a wide courtyard opened up below, forming the facade of an underground Orthodox church. Merino soon…

THE CAVE at Ha Kome has always been a place of last resort. In the early 19th century, a Basotho chief named Kome led his tribe into the Maloti mountains, fleeing a period of war that displaced millions of people throughout southern Africa and led to countless deaths. Kome came across a vast, east-facing cave surrounded by steep valleys and mountainous plateaus and set up camp. The location was “strategic for security reasons during those times,” says Joshua Chakawa, a senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the National University of Lesotho. Members of Kome’s tribe, he says, were able to shield themselves and, critically, their livestock from the violence. Eventually, the tribe built individual homes within the Ha Kome cave, molding six-foot-high domed huts from sticks, mud,…

Scientists and engineers can convert entire libraries into microscopic threads with the help of specialized laboratory equipment. Here they build the word “HELLO” into a strand of DNA—and then turn it back into letters. ENCODING BITS INTO BASES Computers store each letter or pixel of digital data in combinations of ones and zeros. Algorithms then convert them into combinations of the four letters representing DNA’s chemical bases—T, A, G, and C. 2 BUILDING A DNA STRAND Compounds called nucleotides that contain these DNA bases are in a solution of chemicals or enzymes and bond together to build a strand. 3 LONG-TERM ARCHIVING A strand can then be kept in a sealed vial, glass bead, or even synthetic bone for preservation. DNA is stable if stored away from light, water, and…

The Roman Empire reached its greatest extent by the second century A.D., fueled in part by a search for resources beyond what Italia could offer. To make its currency, luxuries, and weapons, Rome needed the silver, gold, lead, and iron deposits found elsewhere. Over the course of more than four centuries, it obtained them by conquering and absorbing other lands. EARLY SUCCESSES Rome takes control of metal-rich areas in Hispania following the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.). For centuries most Roman silver originates here. IMPERIAL SETBACKS A crushing defeat at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9 halts large expansion efforts across the Rhine, but small mining forays do continue. STRIKING IT RICH Pushing into eastern Europe, Rome conquers Dacia, known for its gold and silver deposits, and starts…

Mining at Blöskopf was carried out by Roman soldiers, who were accustomed to foraging materials and building forts but not the backbreaking work of digging underground. Filled with threats from floods, noxious fumes, lack of air, and cave-ins, mining was typically the work of civilian laborers. Silver processing in the Roman era Evidence of smelting and cupellation has not been found at Blöskopf, but archaeologists suspect they may have taken place in the nearby Emsbach or Lahn Valleys. 1. MINING Workers used iron tools to chip away pieces of rock, which were taken out, crushed, washed, sorted, and roasted before smelting. If gallery walls were especially hard, laborers could build fires to weaken their surface. 2. SMELTING Next, the metal ore and charcoal were placed in a furnace. Bellows pumped…