Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i National Geographic Magazine

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. ONE NIGHT LAST DECEMBER, National Geographic Explorer Kim Bernard was stirring her Earl Grey tea in the galley of a research ship off the coast of Antarctica, preparing for a long night of observing a remotely operated vehicle as it surveyed the seafloor. When the marine ecologist looked up to a monitor showing a live video feed sent by the ROV from a depth of more than 3,000 feet in the Southern Ocean’s murky waters, something caught her attention. “I see this tiny little thing come in on the right-hand side of the screen and dart out,” she said. To the other scientists aboard, it probably…

Before Europeans arrived, an estimated 15,000 Lenape speakers may have lived in Lenapehoking, a region that includes present-day New York City. In 1624, the Dutch West India Company founded the city of New Amsterdam on the site. By the mid-1670s, it was under British control and would be until the American Revolution. Built on waves of immigration, it is now home to the largest foreign-born population of any major metropolitan area in the world. Those eras of immigration are envisioned here as the rings of a growing tree. Each dot represents 100 immigrants, each ring a decade. The result is a snapshot of New York City’s diverse ethnic populations over time, from just a few hundred European settlers to 3.2 million immigrants today, most from Latin America and Asia. 3.2…

Some of the world’s most endangered languages are spoken in the city. This graphic takes the form of a world map that shows languages spoken by fewer than a hundred thousand people—and heard on New York City streets. Each is grouped into a country from which it originates and colored to show its most common usage in the city. The size of each language’s name represents its estimated total number of global speakers.…

CULTURE “In Otavalo, where long hair is a tradition for both men and women, this couple reflected how strong and enduring KICHWA CULTURE remains.”IRINA WERNING, photographer and National Geographic Explorer ANIMALS “Mayhem. Chaos. Craziness. I knew I’d only have a few seconds before the dogs would basically FLY OFF. Then they had the zoomies, and they’re going mad, and it is carnage.”SANDRA MAILER, photographer CRAFT “I dedicated a long time to watching CICADAS HATCH outside, and that kind of beautifully informed [the process of] watching the hand-making of the cicada sculptures inside.”SASHA ARUTYUNOVA, photographer SKIES “I’ve chased the NORTHERN LIGHTS as far as Canada’s Northwest Territories, but there was just no way I’d have thought of it happening here. I think it’s the closest thing to magic that you can…

For generations, the Fulani have lived across Africa’s Sahel region, a semiarid belt stretching between the sands of the Sahara in the north and the continent’s forests farther south. Many of their communities are linked by common language, Fula, or its regional variations—offering a glimpse into where they have settled or currently reside. SOURCE: HINDOU OUMAROU IBRAHIM, FULANI MBORORO KNOWLEDGE HOLDER AND NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER…

IN A CONVERTED BARN on a residential lane on Japan’s Tango Peninsula, some 75 miles north of Kyoto, three men are playing with fire. While robust flames lick the edges of a 2300-degree furnace, Kosuke Yamazoe uses a 15-pound hammer on a mass of white-hot steel, flattening it beat by beat in a hypnotic rhythm. Behind the shower of embers raining down on the earthen floor, Tomoyuki Miyagi grips the steel with a pair of iron tongs and bangs a smaller mallet in a melodic counterpoint. Nearby, at a small stove next to a soot-covered wall, Tomoki Kuromoto is making tea. This is the headquarters of Nippon Genshosha, one of the few remaining katana foundries in the world. For hundreds of years, expert swordsmiths forged blades for Japan’s warriors, including…

GLACIAL ICE IS FORMED FROM snow accumulating and compacting over millennia. As the pressure increases, crystalline layers are smoothed into one of the clearest substances found in nature. That alchemy—and the knowledge that climate change is causing glaciers to rapidly disappear—inspired 44-year-old artist Tristan Duke to create a photo lens out of glacial ice. “I just felt this real sense of urgency,” Duke says. He wanted to capture a glacier through its own “eye,” as he puts it, like a self-portrait. In the spring of 2022, Duke hauled hundreds of pounds of gear to Svalbard, Norway, including a giant tent camera that he designed himself and molds for shaping the ice into lenses. The tent functioned like a camera obscura: Duke would place a palm-size piece of ice in a…

FROM OUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS PHOTOGRAPHER Christie Hemm Klok LIKES 61,800+ WHERE Sebastopol, California MEET FLASH, a 90-pound sulcata tortoise enjoying a quiet life with septuagenarian Bruce Robb. Flash was a gift for Robb’s son, Cody, back when the tortoise fit in Robb’s palm. With Cody grown and out of the house, Robb keeps Flash in watermelons—but he knows he can’t do it forever, and sulcatas can live 100 years. “My son’s 35,” Robb says. “I keep telling him, ‘You know, you’re gonna end up with Flash coming back to you eventually.’” A hit on Instagram, Flash is one of the animals featured in a companion story on exotic pets outliving their owners. Read it at natgeo.com/exoticpets. BOOKS TreeNotes: A Year in the Company of Trees collects National Geographic Explorer Nalini…

THE VULTURE HAS TO BE one of the most reviled creatures on Earth. The very word “vulture” is an insult—a synonym for a greedy exploiter. In a way, vultures’ bad reputation is understandable. For starters, they are neither cute nor cuddly, what with their stooped posture, bare heads, and beady eyes. They spend their days eating dead animals—and they do it in a stomach-churning way, by entering the corpse at its soft parts such as the mouth, nose, or anus. “Vultures definitely have an image problem,” says National Geographic Explorer Darcy Ogada, Africa program director at the conservation nonprofit Peregrine Fund, who points out that a bald bird sticking its beak up the rear end of a wildebeest wouldn’t make for the most appealing magazine cover. The birds’ PR problem has…

ON A CHILLY TWILIT EVENING, three men sit around a wood table in the parsonage of a 13th-century church in Transylvania. Outside are ducks, beehives, and a shaggy white dog that we can hear barking at something in the growing dark. Warmed by a wood-burning stove, the men sip tea and nibble savory, pretzel-shaped cookies, and talk about their home, Karácsonyfalva. Transylvania. Is there a better known place-name and a lesser known place? (Perhaps Timbuktu.) Even when all of Europe was wilder, Transylvania stood for its wildest edge. This is why Bram Stoker saw fit to use it as a setting for Dracula, despite never setting foot there. It’s a place where Saxons, Huns, Turks, Tartars, and a dozen less famous tribes are still talked about as if they may have…

Irwin Sanchez, a chef and poet in Queens who speaks Nahuatl, once the language of the Aztec, makes tacos, moles, and tamales with the words’ original meanings in mind. Husniya Khujamyorova, a speaker of Wakhi from Tajikistan, creates some of the very first children’s books for speakers of six Pamiri languages—all now represented along Brooklyn’s own Silk Road. Ibrahima Traore, who made it from Guinea to the Lower East Side, teaches N’ko, a pioneering West African writing system, and pushes for its use in every new technology. Boris Sandler, a Yiddish-speaking writer born in Moldova, contributes in his own way, novel after novel, to the miraculous rebirth of Yiddish in New York. Lenape, the original language of the land the city is built on, is also being revived against all…