Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i National Geographic Magazine

THE PREHISTORIC CLUSTER of standing stones known as Stonehenge has intrigued and mystified observers for centuries. The impressive monument has drawn millions of visitors to England’s Salisbury Plain. Throughout our publishing history, National Geographic has brought images and stories of Stonehenge to readers in new and exciting ways. The magazine’s very first picture of the megaliths is the black-and-white aerial photo to the right. Published in May 1922, it was made possible by the cutting-edge technology of that era: the airplane. For this issue’s cover story, we deployed the latest tools to bring you Stonehenge as you’ve never seen it. We assigned two inventive photographers: Alice Zoo documented people’s connections to Neolithic sites, and Reuben Wu turned landscapes into otherworldly realms steeped in mystery. Then we decided to go further:…

ON 445 ACRES in southern France, construction is under way on a hugely ambitious experiment: a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber surrounded by 11,000 tons of magnets, built to submillimeter precision by a multicountry consortium trying to harness nuclear fusion, the power source of the stars. On paper, nuclear fusion is an energy dream: abundant, with no meltdowns, planet-baking carbon emissions, or long-lived radioactive waste. The in-progress reactor is called ITER, Latin for “the way.” It’s designed to coax hydrogen nuclei to fuse into helium, which will heat the reactor’s walls. In future reactors, this heat could boil water to drive electric steam turbines. Getting fusion to work, however, has been an engineering nightmare. In a device called a tokamak (right), igniting fusion within a magnetically confined plasma requires temperatures of 270…

“DOES THIS REMIND YOU of your childhood?” I ask my mom. I had already posed the question a half dozen times on our journey to find remnants of the summers she spent in New York’s Catskill Mountains in the 1950s. So far, the answer had always been no. Now we are in Ellenville at Cohen’s Bakery, established circa 1920, buying pumpernickel bread and chocolate rugelach. She shrugs. “Maybe if there was a man speaking Yiddish behind the counter.” The Catskills region sprawls across four counties north of New York City, dotted with lakes and crowned with around a hundred mountain peaks. Once it was the sparkling center of Jewish summers, replete with glamorous hotels and thriving small towns. But by the time I moved to New York, in 2011, the…

STONEHENGE The circle is precisely arranged to frame the sun during the solstices. With at least 64 cremations, it has more burials than any other late Neolithic cemetery in Britain. 160+ STONES ERECTED AT STONEHENGE Carpentry techniques to interlock the stones led to unprecedented strength and durability. DURRINGTON WALLS Britain’s biggest henge—two miles from Stonehenge and thought to be home to its builders for about 10 years—is the largest known Neolithic settlement. 1,000 HOUSES IN THE NEOLITHIC SETTLEMENT Some 4,000 people came from near and far to work, trade, and feast during farming off-seasons. AVEBURY For about six centuries, Avebury was altered as its use likely shifted with time. Two avenues of stones linked it with other nearby ceremonial sites. 36 MILLION CUBIC FEET OF CHALK REMOVED Gleaming white when…

ON A WARM AND HUMID MORNING in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh last September, Chetan Singh Solanki stepped off a bus he’d been living in for the past 10 months and walked into a high school auditorium in the small town of Raisen, where 200 students, teachers, and officials had gathered to hear him speak. A solar energy professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai, Solanki is a slender man in his mid-40s with a boyish appearance and a quick smile that are assets for the mission he’s on. In late 2020 he took a leave to make an 11-year road trip around India to inspire action to fight climate change. Solanki’s vehicle is a mobile demonstration of the utility of renewable energy: Solar panels…

Ways to reduce emissions Renewables will need to meet new electricity demand and displace coal. Broad energyefficiency measures and the use of low-carbon fuels in industries such as cement also will be critical.…

FROM OUR PHOTO GRAPHERS WHO A Canada-based nature photographer, filmmaker, and marine biologist WHERE Lemaire Channel, Antarctica WHAT Canon EOS-1D X Mark II with a 16-35mm lens in an underwater housing dome Nicklen, a National Geographic Explorer, spends a lot of time immersed in the frigid waters around the world’s icy environments. During one trip to Antarctica, he pulled on his dry suit to photograph blue-eyed shags—which also have pink feet. The gregarious birds breed in colonies on the Antarctic Peninsula and can be quite curious. As Nicklen stayed motionless in the ocean, several youngsters, including the one above, approached him and pecked inquisitively on the dome covering his camera. National Geographic is the most popular brand on Instagram, with more than 298 million followers. This page showcases images from…

When the pandemic kept artist Erika Blumenfeld from accessing the glass plates to salvage the women’s original marks, she found another way, one that combined modern technology with ancient printmaking methods. Collaborating with the research-based studio Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis, she began with the digital photos captured during the DASCH scanning process and removed all the pixels in those images other than the women’s marks. Blumenfeld and her collaborators uploaded that digital file to a machine that etched the marks onto acrylic plates. They applied transparent ink onto the etched plates, and then pressed each one onto deep blue paper, which at the same time was pressed against thicker backing paper. The intaglio process embossed the blue paper, with the plate’s marks lifting off the sheet.…

Pow! When a wayward chunk of space junk slammed into the moon’s back side on March 4, it was blown to smithereens while adding a fresh crater to an already considerable collection. We know that much because space-watchers could track the errant rocket booster with enough precision to predict its final resting place: Hertzsprung crater. But precisely where the space trash crashed in that 354-mile-wide pockmark wasn’t immediately clear. Of the few spacecraft circling the moon, one well suited to search—NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—could take up to 12 months to find a new gouge estimated to be between 16 and 98 feet wide. As lunar exploration revs up, experts see a need for better tracking of objects in deep space and regulations for disposing of used rocket parts. “Atsome point…

SOMETHING MOMENTOUS was in the air in the south of Britain about 4,500 years ago during the dying days of the Neolithic era, the final chapter of the Stone Age. Whatever it was—religious zeal, bravura, a sense of impending change—it cast a spell over the inhabitants and stirred them into a frenzy of monument building. In an astonishingly brief span of time—perhaps as little as a century—people who lacked metal tools, horsepower, and the wheel erected many of Britain’s huge stone circles, colossal wooden palisades, and grand avenues of standing stones. In the process they robbed forests of their biggest trees and moved millions of tons of earth. “It was like a mania sweeping the countryside, an obsession that drove them to build bigger and bigger, more and more, better…

China and India rising An urbanization boom has caused China’s emissions to surge. As the populations of both developing countries moved out of poverty, fossil fuel use increased. Russia’s Soviet legacy Emissions fell when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russian industries declined. Country and per capita emissions are still below 1990 levels. Europe’s efforts pay off The European Union, through a mix of policies and low-carbon fuel sources, saw a 24 percent drop in emissions even as its economy grew by 60 percent. The U.S. keeps emissions in check Regulations, as well as a shift from coal toward cleaner energy sources such as natural gas, helped emissions drop 20 percent after they rose in the 1990s and early 2000s. Japan evens out The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster led…

THE BLACK BEAR AND HER TWO SMALL CUBS WERE FORAGING IN A DENSE WOODLAND OF MESQUITES, junipers, and Texas madrones when I encountered them some 20 yards off to my right. The mother bear stopped but did not rear up. No doubt she had heard me coming. She looked me over. I was her inferior in every way that counted at this moment. I was hiking alone that October morning on the 12.5-mile-long South Rim Trail in Big Bend National Park in West Texas. I’d arrived at the park just after dawn, escorted by jackrabbits and roadrunners along the highway, and for the first two hours of steady ascent the only signs of life had been butterflies, a couple of bright yellow Scott’s orioles, and a backpacker who was just…

AT THE AGE OF 12, my twin sister and I embarked on a special type of education. For three years we attended a Quran school for girls in our home city of Istanbul. The experience stayed with me, and when I later became a photographer, I knew I had to return to it, with my Hasselblad camera in hand. For this project I visited my school and others across Turkey, where girls ages eight to 19 spend up to four years trying to memorize all 604 pages of the Muslim religious text. Some of these boarding schools provide secular classes, but the main focus is on learning the Quran, a traditional practice dating to the time of Muhammad. I wanted to document it—not only the discipline required to become a…

Horse conchs, America’s largest sea snails, are at higher risk of extinction after a century of unregulated harvesting of their shells, a new study finds. Using chemical isotopes from conch shells to gauge age and reproductive maturity, scientists found that females spawn late in life. Overharvesting could cost many that chance. Though the horse conch is Florida’s state seashell, gathering it there isn’t limited—a step that could help save it, says study author Gregory S. Herbert.…

CRYPTIC CIRCLES Stonehenge, the most complex and famous stone circle in the British Isles, is just one of about 1,300 of these prehistoric monuments. Several late Neolithic megasites, including many giant earthwork and timber circles, provide clues that their builders traveled long distances to take part in these communal projects. STONE AGE SITE, MODERN WORLD A controversial plan to build a two-mile tunnel for improving traffic near Stonehenge has been temporarily halted by a court order. LATE NEOLITHIC-ERA MONUMENTS (map key) Stone circles are thought to be civic gathering sites, worship centers, or burial sites. Henge enclosures often surround timber or stone structures. A henge is a banked, circular ditch. Monumental mounds of earth can be found not far from prominent enclosures. Palisaded enclosures are fences made of timbers driven…

HORSESHOE CRABS ARE BUILT TO LAST. With spiky tails, shells shaped like combat helmets, and sharp pincers at the end of eight of their 10 legs, these ancient invertebrates have been scuttling along the ocean floor relatively unchanged for some 450 million years. They managed to survive the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Surviving humans may prove more difficult. Like many marine animals, horseshoe crabs are overfished for food and bait, and coastal development has destroyed spawning sites. But they also are collected en masse for their blue blood, which contains a rare clotting agent critical for the development of safe vaccines. The blood may be lifesaving for humans, but its harvest often kills the animals—particularly in much of Asia, where they are drained of all their blood rather than…

The rise of solar power In country rankings, India is now the world’s fourth largest generator of energy from the sun. By 2030, solar is expected to have outpaced all other renewables here. Large solar park Hazardous burning Widespread use of traditional biomass fuels, such as firewood and farm waste, is a national health crisis. Some 660 million Indians are exposed to harmful indoor pollution from cooking. Coal drives emissions India imports coal even though it has the world’s fifth largest reserves. Coal fuels 72 percent of India’s electricity; coal-fired power plants are the country’s biggest source of emissions. More oil to fuel more cars Demand for oil doubled over the past two decades, driven by a fivefold increase in personal vehicle ownership since 2000. At 75 percent, India is…