Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, on the border of Argentina and Chile, is remote, windy, and bitterly cold. Last September I schlepped cameras and camping gear by ski and sled across 30 miles of unforgiving terrain to document climber Colin Haley’s attempt to make the first solo winter ascent of 10,262-foot Cerro Torre. We kept in constant radio contact, and while Colin made his way over a crevasse in the glacier and up to a bivouac a couple of rope lengths below the summit, I hauled nearly 80 pounds of gear to the base of the mountain and set up my own camp. As he approached the final rime formations that encase the peak, I launched my drone to capture a series of images showing him alone on the world’s…

HEATHER MASON WAS used to her quarry being much more elusive. Seahorses are often only a few inches long, can change colors like a chameleon, and rarely gather in groups. Their ability to disappear into their habitats—tropical seagrasses, mangroves, and reefs—helps keep the slow-swimming, largely defenseless fish from becoming an easy meal. That makes devoting a career to studying them, as Mason, a marine ecologist at the University of Tampa, has done for decades, an exercise in patience. But when she first snorkeled the pristine waters of Sweetings Pond on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, she found herself in a seahorsestudded heaven. Over her first weekend in the pond’s clear blue water, in 2013, she counted 16 seahorses—far more than the one or two she’d be lucky to spot during multiweek…

THOUSANDS OF PIECES of pottery like this one—crafted in Campania, in what’s now southern Italy—filled the hold of a wrecked Greek ship. The cargo went down in the western Mediterranean, only to rise again a couple of millennia later thanks to Jacques-Yves Cousteau, famed oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer. In 1952, off a French islet near Marseille, his divers launched one of the world’s first underwater excavations, and the breadth of the haul was extraordinary. Alongside more than 7,000 ceramic pieces were some 2,000 clay jugs, called amphorae, once full of wine. (They’d belonged, archaeologists later realized, to two different ships wrecked at the same site.) When Cousteau found a single jug still sealed, he had the cork scraped away and poured out what a crewmate called a “dark brown,…

The Brazilian country tunes that will make you a fan of sertanejo music While chronicling the rise of sertanejo music (“How Brazil Went Country,” p. 72) in sync with Brazil’s agricultural ascendance, writer Mac Margolis and photographer Luisa Dörr had plenty of time to listen to the radio-dominating cowboy pop. Here, a few of their favorite tracks: “Os Menino da Pecuária,” Léo and Raphael “The title means ‘cattle boys.’ Shamelessly glorifying Big Ag, performed by cosplaying stockmen. So over the top.”—Margolis “Evidências,” Chitãozinho and Xororó “A national anthem of longing and confession. You hear it at weddings, in bars, at the end of parties when everyone’s singing together.”—Dörr “Moradia,” Bruna Viola “Just a 10-string caipira viola and vocals like the howling wind.”—Margolis WHAT MAKES MONGOLIAN WOLVES HARD TO FIND Texan…

OCEAN LIFE While “muck diving”—that is, scouring the seafloor for surprising creatures—in Indonesia’s Lembeh Strait, photographer Ross Gudgeon came across a cluster of what he recognized as cauliflower soft coral. “Really boring from the outside,” Gudgeon says, since it simply resembles its namesake. But when he carefully poked his special underwater probe lens into a clump of the coral, he captured a fractal universe of towering, polyp-tipped branches. CULTURE Opera performers prepare to take the stage at a community center in New York City’s Chinatown, part of a production sponsored by the Mencius Society for the Arts. Some cast members are professionals from China, while others are local amateurs curious about an ancient art form linked to their heritage. Among the latter, photographer Andrew Kung says, there’s “a yearning to know…

Reporting in this article is presented by the National Geographic Society in partnership with Rolex under the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions. THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN REACHES of our planet are heating up faster than anywhere else on Earth. While researchers already know that the region is poised to change dramatically—with ice melting and sea levels rising—there’s a larger question of just what species may survive under those new conditions. Which is how microbial oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer Allison Fong found herself wearing a dry suit and 80 pounds of scuba gear underneath a 26-foot-thick ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, clutching a glorified turkey baster. Fong was using the enormous syringe to slurp up a thin film of tiny organisms living in the floe’s underbelly. These…

Justin Jin’s pursuit of a perfect pour While photographing the lab where Belgian yeast researchers are out to create the ultimate nonalcoholic suds (“The Quest to Reengineer Beer,” p. 14), Justin Jin became so fixated on capturing the beverage’s essence—“the luminosity, the translucence, the color”—that the lab’s director eventually handed him a flask and tulip glass and told him to take them home. Jin, who’s lived in Brussels for 15 years, wrapped the shoot at his kitchen table. What two Explorers pack for the poles To take the photos accompanying this month’s profile of sea ice ecologist and National Geographic Explorer Allison Fong (“The Poles Are Teeming With More Life Than We Can See,” p. 108), Luján Agusti sailed with Fong aboard an Antarctic research vessel, and Esther Horvath joined…

TO APPRECIATE HOW the Madrean Sky Islands earn their nickname, it helps to imagine the hawk’s-eye view. Looking down over the borderlands that stretch out across Arizona, New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, you would see a wide swath of desert scattered with more than 50 small, rugged mountain ranges: an archipelago of green on either side of the international border. These high-country oases help make the Sky Islands region one of the world’s most spectacularly biodiverse, a place where a fleetfooted mammal might wander among five different biomes in a day, from dusty desert scrub to lush pine and fir forests. And for millennia, wild creatures of all sorts—javelinas and pronghorn, coyotes and ocelots, black bears and jaguars—have moved across this land by following the…

THE HORSE’S BODY WAS STILL WARM when the three men came upon it in the snow. From only the wounds and a constellation of tracks around the horse, the trio of Kazakh herders could unspool the morning: A pair of wolves had jumped onto the horse’s upper back and brought it to its knees. Because its tender rear flank was missing—the part a wolf might gorge on and then later regurgitate to a nursing mother tending to her young—the hunters were confident there was a den nearby. Eyes peeled, they stowed their guns and traveled on. The wolf hunt continued. The hunters—Aibolat Kulmeskhan, Galym Bapar, and Serikbol Koshegen—belong to a community of nomadic Kazakh herders that has been shepherding livestock for generations through Mongolia’s jagged, windswept Altay Mountains. Though Kazakhs…