Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2015 i The Explorers Journal

subscribe to THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL online today! WWW.EXPLORERS.ORGAVAILABLE IN PRINT AND AS A DIGITAL PUBLICATION From vast ocean depths to the frontiers of outer space, THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL offers firsthand reporting from those pushing the limits of knowledge and human endurance. Founded in 1904 to promote exploration “by all means possible,” The Explorers Club is an international organization dedicated to the advancement of field exploration and scientific inquiry. Among our members are leading pioneers in oceanography, mountaineering, archaeology, and the planetary and environmental sciences.…

JOIN THE “EXPLORERS IMMORTALS” AND ENGRAVE YOUR NAME OR DEDICATION IN STONE ON NEW PAVERS FOR THE LEFRAK TERRACE AT EXPLORERS CLUB HEADQUARTERS. ADORN OUR LANDMARK OUTDOOR SPACE AND HELP PAY FOR URGENT WORK FOR PHASE II RENOVATIONS BY MAKING A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION OF $2,500 PER DEDICATED PAVER TO OUR LOWELL THOMAS BUILDING FUND. THE EXPLORERS CLUB WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE FOLLOWING WHO HAVE PURCHASED A PAVER: Robert Ashton, James H. Alexander, John G. Alexander, Darlene T. Anderson, Jeanne D. Andlinger, Barbara Annan, Robert J. Aresty, Atlanta Chapter, Robert J. Atwater, Norman L. Baker, Andreas Bender, Josh Bernstein, John Bierley, Bruce Blanchard, John R. Bockstoce, Brian M. Boom, John R. Boreske Jr., Gary W. Bowersox, Lawson W. Brigham, Diane Britz-Lotti, Julianne M. Chase, James M. Clash, Allen S. Counter,…

“the shark lady” MAY 4, 1922 – FEBRUARY 25, 2015 When asked what had been her most important takeaway from her decades of work in the ocean, Eugenie Clark said, “Gratitude, for unlocking some of the sea’s mysteries and for the people I’ve met.” For those of us who knew and worked with the legendary marine scientist, her passing this past February at age 92 was a tremendous loss. Yet, we are grateful for having had a chance to take to the seas with “Genie,” a fearless explorer who continued to conduct research up until the end, when she succumbed after a long and valiant battle with lung cancer. In the late 1940s, Genie pioneered the use of SCUBA diving for research purposes and in the process paved the way…

216 PP • NEW YORK: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014 • ISBN-10: 0231166842 • ISBN-13: 978-0231166843 • $27.95 With more than 70 million people added each year to the Earth’s population and with a projected 9 billion humans living on the planet by mid-century, our current dependency on animal protein for food will no longer be sustainable. Insects, however, offer a viable, nutritious, and delicious alternative, requiring far less farmland, water, and food. Eating insects is not new. They have always been a staple food for many species and for own. Many world cultures continue to consume insects regularly. It is only in the West that there is an aversion to consuming insects. In this new book by Arnold van Huis, a tropical entomologist from Wageningen University in Holland; chef and…

46 EAST 70TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10021 I 212-628-8383 I WWW.EXPLORERS.ORG ALASKA L. Michelle Ridgway Tel: 907-957-2277 mishridgway@gmail.com ATLANTA Steve Pigott Tel: 770-337-5450 jagter@msn.com AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND David Strike Tel: 61-2-9971-2559 Cell: 61-0-411-254 066 strikinc1@optusnet.com.au CANADA Elaine Wyatt chapterchair@explorersclub.ca CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA Prof. Claudio Cristino Tel: 562-458-3736 cristino@uchile.cl CHICAGO/GREAT LAKES Robert A. Shuchman, Ph.D. Tel: 734-649-0937 shuchman@mtu.edu EAST AND SOUTH ASIA Steven R. Schwankert Tel: 86-1350-116-3629 steven@sinoscuba.com FLORIDA Aida “Idee” Belau Tel: 321-243-8448 chair@floridaexplorersclub.org GEORGE ROGERS CLARK Leonard A. Weakley, Jr. Tel: 513-702-0725 lweakley@rendigs.com GREAT BRITAIN AND WESTERN EUROPE Seb Coulthard Tel: 44-7960-479485 sebcoulthard@hotmail.com GREATER PIEDMONT David N. Brinkman dobrink@bellsouth.net NEW ENGLAND Gregory Deyermenjian Tel: 781-968-5174 paititi@alumni.clarku.edu NORTH PACIFIC ALASKA Mead Treadwell Tel: 907-258-7764 Fax: 907-258-7768 meadwell@alaska.net NORTHERN CALIFORNIA Joan Boothe Tel: 415-233-1697 hoodooskr@aol.com NORWAY Synnøve Marie…

Over the past few months, our organization has made great progress in laying the groundwork for an exciting year ahead, carrying out the Club’s mission of advancing and supporting exploration. At our June Board meeting, we initiated a new collaboration with the Boy Scouts of America—thanks to Mike Manyak and a number of other members—and approved pursuing a 2017 global exploration summit with several world-class partners that will celebrate and help define the future of exploration. For our 2015 Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner this fall, we will be focusing on conservation, which is an integral component of exploration. Titled “Visionaries of Conservation: Paradigm Shifts in Protecting the Planet,” the event, along with a host of other weekend activities, will be held in Melbourne, Florida, November 6 through 8. We are…

Ben Ayers has lived and worked in Nepal since the late 1990s. In 1999, he founded Porters’ Progress to improve conditions for mountaineering workers. In 2006 Ayers joined the dZi Foundation, which is dedicated to empowerment and poverty alleviation in some of the most remote villages in Nepal. A fellow of The Explorers Club since 1982, Kevin Bubriski is an award-winning photographer. His books include Portrait of Nepal and the recently released Nepal 1975–2011. He is codirector of documentary studies at Green Mountain College in Vermont. KATHMANDU: Given the depth and location of the earthquakes that struck Nepal on April 25, and again on May 12, most expected the greatest toll would be exacted on the densely packed, poorly built houses of Kathmandu and the surrounding areas. Yet the quakes…

JUST BEYOND THE DEEP WATER LOOMED THE MASSIVE TRUNK COVERED BY A TANGLE OF STRANGLER FIG LIANAS. THE TREE WAS MAGNIFICENT, MUCH LARGER THAN ANY OF THE SURROUNDING OLD-GROWTH TREES. WE HAD DISCOVERED ANOTHER ANCIENT GIANT! PHOTOGRAPH BY RALPH ARWOOD. A Fellow of The Explorers Club since 2007, C. Michael Knight is a Florida-based conservation biologist who was the first to scientifically document the legendary “Luminous Lizard” of Trinidad. A certified divemaster, he has participated in coral reef biodiversity surveys throughout the Caribbean and the Sea of Cortez. As an educator he has developed expedition-style field ecology courses in the Florida Everglades and in the rain forests of South America. His work was recently featured in the PBS “Wild Florida” series. The morning sun was barely above the tree line…

300 PP • NEW YORK: THAMES AND HUDSON, 2015 • ISBN-10: 0500544468 • ISBN-13: 978-0500544464 • $90 In 1919, Martin Gusinde, a German priest and ethnographer set out for Tierra del Fuego, where he hoped to find and to study its indigenous peoples. He was shocked to find that colonists had been ruthlessly exterminating the tribes for decades. By the time of his arrival there were only a few hundred indigenous people left, living in small groups scattered through the islands of the archipelago. The 32-year-old Gusinde wrote, “As these people disappear, so does their very uniqueness…the most urgent thing now is to save what is left.” Between 1919 and 1924, Gusinde undertook four expeditions among the Selk’nam, Yamana, and Kawésqa to document what remained of their cultural traditions. One…

224 PP • NEW YORK: NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN PRESS, 2014 • ISBN-10: 089327528X • ISBN-13: 978-0893275280 • $69 In his latest book, Sir Ghillean Prance details 16 major expeditions he led over the past half century, which have resulted in the discovery of new Amazonian flora. During his decades in the field, Prance spent time with the local indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, learning how they live in and use the forest and its plants, including those harvested for medicinal purposes. His has also worked closely with the native peoples to find ways to use the bounty of the forest without destroying it. In the course of his research, Prance became active, with fellow scientists, in doing what he could to keep the forests from being cut down. To…

—Scott Hamilton, MED’82 John G. Alexander Robert J. Atwater Capt. Norman L. Baker Barbara Ballard Robert D. Ballard, Ph.D. Samuel B. Ballen* Mark Gregory Bayuk Daniel A. Bennett Josh Bernstein Bruce Blanchard John R. Bockstoce, D.Phil. Bjorn G. Bolstad* Capt. Bruce M. Bongar, Ph.D. Brian M. Boom, Ph.D. Garrett R. Bowden Capt. Lawson W. Brigham, Ph.D., USCG (ret.) Harry Davis Brooks Lt. Col. Jewell Richard Browder* August “Augie” Brown John C.D. Bruno Lee R. Bynum* Virginia Castagnola Hunter Julianne M. Chase, Ph.D. James M. Chester* Maj. Gen. Arthur W. Clark, USAF (Ret.) Capt. William Clark* Steven Cohen, Ph.D. (hon.) Leslie E. Colby* Jonathan M. Conrad Catherine Nixon Cooke S. Allen Counter, Ph.D. D.M. Sc. Constance Difede David A. Dolan Mr. & Mrs. James Donovan Col. William H. Dribben, USA (Ret.)*…

JC: What were you doing at the time you won the Nobel Prize? FW: I had been anticipating that this might happen for years and knew when the prize was going to be announced—six in the morning, noon in Sweden. I thought if there would be a call, it would not be before six. I hadn’t been able to sleep, so at five I decided to take a shower. At eleven minutes after five, my wife came in with a telephone, said a woman with a beautiful voice was calling from Sweden, and that she wanted to talk to me! JC: In layman’s terms, why did you win? FW: There are four fundamental forces of nature. Two have been known for a long time: gravity and electromagnetism. In the early…

It is rare that we will return to a subject so well covered in a given edition in the one that follows it, yet such is the case with Nepal. When we published Kevin Bubriski’s “Then and Now” photo essay on the Himalayan nation this past spring, we had little inkling that the “now” he had so elegantly captured would itself become a “then” within weeks of publication, with cherished monuments reduced to rubble and thousands of lives lost in the April 25 earthquake and its attendant aftershocks. Bubriski immediately returned to his beloved Nepal to record what had survived and the ongoing efforts to preserve and rebuild. Accompanying his arresting images is a commentary by Kathmandu resident Ben Ayers, a key player in the pop-up aid group headquartered at…

176 PP • NEW YORK: WW NORTON AND CO, 2015 • ISBN-10: 0393350843 • ISBN-13: 978-0393350845 • $13.95 In his new book, award-winning author David Quammen tells the story of the rise and spread of AIDS, which emerged in the Congo more than a century ago, likely during a “bloody encounter” between a single chimpanzee and a human. Thanks to molecular genetics, he can pinpoint the place—“near a minor tributary of the Congo in the southwestern part of the Cameroon” and the time—1908. It was through that chance encounter that the disease, which originated in non-human “reservoir,” “spilled over” to a human host in a process scientists call zoonosis. Quammen embarks on a journey to explore the culture and geography of the origins of the virus to “see the route…

273 PP • NEW YORK & LONDON: VERSO, 2014 • ISBN-13: 978-1781685570 • $19.95 • REVIEWED BY CARL G. SCHUSTER In an unbridled quest for the ultimate urban adventure Garrett has “place-hacked” the closed, secret, and otherwise forgotten spaces—abandoned rail lines, quarries, sewer systems, and secured facilities—in London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles, seeing in them places for existential challenge and discovery for those who are truly open-minded. In chronicling his high-adrenaline adventures, which more often than not, involve bypassing elaborate security systems to achieve their objectives, he delves into the sociology of the teams with which he accomplished his “investigations.” Venturing into such territory requires its own lingo. The reader is presented with terms such as “edgework,” undertaking a life-threatening risk for no other reason than “to…