Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2024 i National Geographic Magazine

COLOMBIAN MARINE biologist Fernando Trujillo has been named the 2024 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. This award is given by the National Geographic Society to an intrepid Explorer who highlights vital issues facing our planet and inspires others to act. “His work in South America enhances protections for endangered wildlife and supports sustainable practices for the betterment of local communities,” says Jill Tiefenthaler, CEO of the Society. Trujillo has dedicated his life to saving the Amazon’s river dolphins, and he was given another name by the Tikuna Indigenous people who live along the Amazon River in Colombia: omacha. At first he didn’t understand why. But after Trujillo figured out the reason, he realized the moniker was so apt he adopted it for his conservation organization. Omacha, in Tikuna…

WE COULD BE ON ANOTHER PLANET. A craggy, hostile surface stretches as far as the eye can see, framed by slopes of black ash. These are the new lava flows on La Palma, in the volcanic Canarian archipelago, off the coast of Morocco. They appeared in the fall of 2021, when, for three months, more than 50 billion gallons of molten rock erupted from the island’s Tajogaite volcano. Transit through most of the lava field is still reserved for scientists and environmental officials. I’m accompanying Octavio Fernández Lorenzo, vice president of the Canary Islands Speleology Federation. Alongside researchers from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME), Fernández is responsible for exploring and surveying the tunnels that lava left in its wake. Known in most scientific literature as pyroducts or…

THE BOUNTY OF THE GULF OF MAINE. The sea within a sea, as it’s often called, is a body of water that extends 36,000 square miles along the eastern seaboard of North America, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to New Brunswick, and encompasses the coastlines of New Hampshire, Maine, and Nova Scotia. Indigenous Americans who have lived in this region for more than 12,000 years learned the gulf’s natural rhythms and sustainably harvested its rich waters. Europeans who began to settle in the area in the 15th century recorded tales of an endless abundance, with cod that measured up to five feet long. Before the American Revolution began, giant lobsters and thick schools of fish would have had a front-row seat to the Boston Tea Party. I think of the Gulf…

GROWING UP IN INDIA, I would spend summer breaks visiting my grandparents in Kolkata. Each afternoon, my grandmother settled down on a floor mat, facing the family’s worship room, where stone idols of Hindu deities sat on little wooden thrones. For half an hour, she would sit still, her eyes closed, fingers rolling her prayer beads, chanting Krishna’s name in a barely audible whisper. As a little boy, I found this an opportune moment to tiptoe around her and help myself to the jar of delicious sweetened tamarind paste she kept on a shelf behind where she sat. But I never gave much thought to what she might be getting out of this daily ritual. It’s impossible to know, objectively, whether those afternoon meditation sessions helped my grandmother achieve some…

THE AMERICAN GREAT PLAINS have their bison, and the Serengeti has its wildebeests. But on the steppes of Central Asia, saiga antelope make the ground tremble. While this floppy-nosed ungulate had appeared to be on a collision course with extinction because of disease and poaching, recent population estimates offer hope. In late 2023 the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced that saigas number about 1.9 million, prompting a change in status from critically endangered to near threatened. The saiga boom is an indication that 20 years of global efforts have managed to decrease poaching for the traditional-medicine trade. While the species isn’t completely out of danger yet, signs point to a remarkable conservation success story in the making. The National Geographic Society funds Explorer Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark project,…

VITAMIN C TO FIGHT A COLD? Carrots for vision-boosting vitamin A? Fatty fish—and sunlight—for bone-building vitamin D? We all know that vitamins are critical for our health, but how did they get their names, and, more important, when were they found in the first place? Though humans have always understood there’s a connection between diet and health, it took thousands of years for modern nutrition research—bolstered by advances in chemistry, physics, and biology—to emerge. Early experiments focused largely on the element nitrogen, first discovered in 1772, and whether its presence or absence in foods caused animals and humans to be healthy or sick. Then in 1838, Dutch chemist Gerardus Johannis Mulder proposed the existence of a compound he called protein, which he argued played a “principal role” in nourishment. For…

* KURDISH POPULATION FIGURES ARE ESTIMATES. MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF SOURCES: CIA WORLD FACTBOOK; UN WORLD POPULATION PROSPECTS; KURDISTAN REGIONAL GOVERNMENT; YEREVAN SAEED, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY…

ON NEWS STANDS OUR RECENT SPECIAL ISSUE Great American Parks showcases 50 iconic destinations, including Everglades National Park (above). The Florida wetland, home to more than 50 reptile species, as well as hundreds of bird species, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and an international biosphere reserve. The publication celebrates a wide range of the country’s best public spaces, from national parks like Yellowstone—designated the first in 1872—to urban oases such as Central Park in New York City. There are also lesser known treasures to discover: Nevada’s Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, established in 2023, contains one of the world’s largest Joshua tree forests. Not just beautiful places, these parks are for reflection too—about conflict, for instance, at the War in the Pacific National Historical Park in Guam, or colonialism at…

With timeless precision, the chisel blade carves a delicate slither of curling wood, each cut helping to transform nature into art. “Here, in our area we carved house posts,” explains Xwalacktun, an artist of the Squamish Nation. “They were for teaching and passing on knowledge to others who aren’t here yet.” It’s an important part of the rich Indigenous heritage that Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Joseph Fiennes experience as they travel across Canada in the documentary Return to the Wild. “One of the most beautiful aspects of Indigenous culture is storytelling,” enthuses Mackenzie Brown, a Cree woman, drummer, singer, and storyteller living in the enigmatic shadow of the Canadian Rockies. “We have beautiful creation stories, stories about the constellations, and stories about our spectacular nature.” These form an essential Oral…

MORE THAN a half century ago, a long-term study—one of the first sizable studies of its kind—led to a surprising discovery. In 1967, researchers in the United Kingdom began tracking the health of some 17,500 British civil servants ages 40 to 64 in the Whitehall area of London. The researchers found that employees who ranked low in the hierarchy, such as office support staff, died earlier and at a higher rate than senior civil servants who occupied the upper echelons of society. Inexplicably, the lower-ranked employees suffered a greater incidence of coronary heart disease. In a follow-up study of 10,300 civil servants ages 35 to 55, researchers identified a possible explanation for this status-related disparity: The lower-ranked ones tended to have less influence over decision-making at work. As a result,…

TEEMING WITH LIFE, coral reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor but sustain 25 percent of marine species. These hubs of biodiversity now face existential threats, from ocean warming and acidification to destructive fishing practices and pollution. It’s their stunning beauty that first caught the attention of photographer Georgette Apol Douwma during a trip to the Great Barrier Reef in the 1970s. Some 40 years, many scuba dives, and thousands of pictures later, Douwma began to reimagine her catalog by duplicating and reversing images to create symmetrical patterns similar to a kaleidoscope’s. The results emphasize the vibrancy and brilliance of these vulnerable underwater wonders.…

Seddiq Salih had a favor to ask. It was dusk, and we were standing in his family’s small orchard on the outskirts of Slemani, a city known as the cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. I’d been granted a meeting later that night with a secretive elder sheikh rumored to possess one of the finest collections of Kurdish manuscripts. Seddiq, a mild-mannered 65-year-old with a permanent smile, now looked serious. “Ask him: ‘You have collected so many manuscripts, why not give some to Zheen?’” Zheen, which means “life” in Kurdish, is the name of an archive that Seddiq and his brother Rafiq have spent more than two decades building. An assemblage of books, manuscripts, newspapers, letters, diaries, and other documents dating back to the 19th century, it presents the twisting saga…