Innehållsförteckning för August 2023 från National Geographic Magazine

WHEN I WAS A BOY, I couldn’t read enough about polar exploration. Robert Peary, Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Ernest Shackleton—the tales of these explorers and their crews, battling the elements and the odds in the Arctic and Antarctic, were filled with such drama and pathos that I was transfixed. And I’m still an enthusiast, not only of the stories but also of the regions they explored, places both captivating in their beauty and of critical importance for what they tell us about the ways climate change is affecting our planet. This issue’s cover story is its own odyssey of Arctic exploration. In the mid-19th century, Sir John Franklin led a crew of 128 men from England in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route through Arctic waters linking…

On a nighttime canoe trip in Townsville, Australia, two biologists stumbled upon a scientific discovery. As they paddled along the Ross River, Eric Nordberg and Donald McKnight noticed freshwater turtles basking just as they do during the day—but by moonlight. A variety of animals, including freshwater turtles, bask in sunlight to regulate their temperature and metabolism. Many freshwater turtle species can be spotted resting on logs and rocks while they take in the sun’s rays. But until Nordberg and McKnight’s canoe trip, night basking had never been studied. It isn’t unique to the Krefft’s river turtles (Emydura macquarii krefftii) that they observed in Townsville either. The biologists’ further research, recently reported in Global Ecology and Conservation, documents that at least 13 species of turtles across six families bask at night,…

NAME Psittacosaurus sp. ORIGIN Liaoning Province, China DISTINCTION A fossil of the dinosaur at Germany’s Senckenberg Natural History Museum contains uniquely complete and well-preserved skin and tail bristles, enabling a series of groundbreaking scientific studies. In the entryway of Frankfurt, Germany’s Senckenberg Natural History Museum, a remarkable ambassador from the distant past holds court: a dog-size dinosaur called Psittacosaurus that died some 130 million years ago. The creature is so well preserved, scientists can see the finest details of its skin with astounding fidelity. The specimen—officially known as SMF R 4970—left China in the 1990s under legally dubious circumstances, amid a rash of fossil smuggling out of the country’s Liaoning Province. After the fossil traveled through the U.S. and Europe in the hands of a German dealer, the museum bought…

AMONG THE EMBALMERS DEEP IN AN UNDERGOUND embalming workshop, or wabet, in the Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara, the 70-day mummification process begins. A priest wearing a mask of jackal-headed Anubis, god of funerary rites, officiates. By the 26th dynasty (664-525 b.c.) the embalmers—illustrated here based on the excavations and theories of the late archaeologist Ramadan Hussein—would have been dedicated to making the dead appear as lifelike as possible. Only then could a priest reunite the body with its spirit, or ka, and the deceased begin its final journey to the hereafter. GATEWAY TO THE AFTERLIFE THE NECROPOLIS of the ancient capital of Memphis, Saqqara is situated on the Nile River’s west bank, the direction in which the sun sets and where the Egyptians believed the afterlife began. The workshop, discovered…

AFTER UTAH STATE Historic Preservation Officer Chris Merritt showed me the ruins of Kelton, the last of the railroad ghost towns he wanted me to see that day, a storm whipped up on the horizon. I stood there watching the landscape, these clouds, the winds blowing up the dust, and I thought about what life was like more than 150 years ago for the Chinese workers who lived here then, laying rail and inhabiting this thrown-together desert settlement thousands of miles from home. There’s a fenced cemetery, not far away, where volunteers with dogs are helping locate remains outside the fence—probably the bones of Chinese workers, because the Chinese weren’t allowed to be buried where the white people were. I stood there too, and what I felt, for these people…

In 2021 Stuart decided to spend the winter in Florida for the same reason many birds do: warmth. She drove her camper for weeks around Merritt Island, part of a biodiverse estuary, capturing images of birds. Though Stuart has photographed over a hundred avian species across the country, she found those in the Sunshine State to be less skittish. Sure enough, this roseate spoonbill wasn’t spooked by her camera when she came upon it one morning. Stuart sat quietly by the road, observing the bird and snapping the shutter. National Geographic has more than 374 million Instagram followers. Join them here: @natgeo, @natgeotravel, @natgeointhefield, @natgeoadventure, @natgeoyourshot, @natgeotv, @natgeowild, @natgeodocs. WHO A wildlife conservation photographer based in the Pacific Northwest WHERE Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Florida WHAT Canon Mark IV…

LIKE THE VAST EXPANSES they constitute, drops of seawater teem with life. Scientists estimate that some may contain as many as a million organisms, most too small to see with the naked eye. But put a drop under a microscope, and you will likely find free-swimming fish larvae, crawling copepods, and peculiar protists. While these minuscule creatures and their water worlds are overlooked by most of us, Spanish photographer Angel Fitor has made them his muse. As a teenager, Fitor spent much of his time peering into the fish tank at his childhood home in Alicante. “My relationship with the underwater world started actually behind the glass,” he says. Now 50 and also a self-taught naturalist, he’s turned his passion into a career. “I’m working behind the glass, only a…

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD PENNY KEMP began primping sheep for show at age seven, entering the long tradition of livestock competitions, a staple of state and county fairs across America. Now she can “fit” Spud the ram in less than four hours, transforming him from a woolly blob into a first-rate representation of his rare heritage breed, Romeldale CVM. Penny works with the Youth Conservationist Program and a summer camp at Connecticut’s Henny Penny Farm to involve more youngsters. “I like seeing the kids connect with the animals, especially when kids don’t come from agricultural backgrounds.”…

A recent study links changes in the retina to the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Working from postmortem retinal and brain tissue samples from 86 human donors, researchers found that higher levels of beta-amyloid protein in the retina corresponded to higher levels in the brain and more severe cognitive decline. Examining the retina—the only part of the central nervous system that can be directly observed—could help doctors intervene earlier in Alzheimer’s disease.…

JACOB KEANIK SCANNED HIS BINOCULARS over the field of ice surrounding our sailboat. He was looking for the polar bear that had been stalking us for the past 24 hours, but all he could see was an undulating carpet of blue-green pack ice that stretched to the horizon. “Winter is coming,” he murmured. Jacob had never seen Game of Thrones and was unaware of the phrase’s reference to the show’s menacing hordes of ice zombies, but to us, the threat posed by this frozen horde was equally dire. Here in remote Pasley Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, winter would bring a relentless tide of boat-crushing ice. If we didn’t find a way out soon, it could trap us and destroy our vessel—and perhaps us too. It was late August, and…

THAT BEACH WITH A TANK, Flamenco, has been named one of the top 10 beaches in the world. I’m Puerto Rican, and by photographing it like this, I’m trying to make a point. This place that is beautiful—and enjoyable, and a tourist destination—has a complicated history that’s important to understand, for both visitors and locals. When I was a child in San Juan schools, a lot of our story was glossed over: The islands were “discovered” by Christopher Columbus, the Taíno Indians were decimated, the U.S. “happened” into possession of it, Puerto Ricans were made U.S. citizens in 1917, in 1951 there was a referendum, our constitution was written, we lived happily ever after. You know? It wasn’t until I began to learn more deeply about these episodes that many…

Mark Synnott The best-selling author, longtime adventurer, mountain guide, and pioneering climber of remote rock walls has been an Explorer since 1999. In National Geographic’s January issue, Synnott wrote about efforts to protect antiquities in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. For this month’s cover story, he took a harrowing journey through Arctic waters. At the end of the expedition, he left his sailboat, Polar Sun, in Nome, Alaska. How will he return it to his home in Maine? “I’m definitely not going back through the Northwest Passage,” he vows. Page 34 Muhammed Muheisen A photographer who’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice, Muheisen also established the Dutch nonprofit Everyday Refugees Foundation. He’s been documenting the consequences of refugee crises around the world for more than a decade, and he became an…

In 1845, British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men set out in search of the Northwest Passage—a fabled sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific that would hasten trade between Europe and Asia. None of Franklin’s crew survived. The Norwegian ship Gjøa in 1903-06 made the first successful passage. In 2022, a National Geographic team attempted to retrace Franklin’s expedition to find fresh evidence of its undoing. HUNTING FOR CLUES The evidence of the fate of Franklin and his men comes from a scrawled note, a scattering of remains, two sunken ships, and Inuit oral testimony passed through generations. The National Geographic team believed more answers would lie in an undiscovered tomb of Franklin. They searched for 10 days on all-terrain vehicles across rugged and…

PABLITO WAS THE FIRST LION I’d ever seen up close. The cub, about four months old, walked toward me from the night room in his enclosure at the New Hope Centre, a wildlife rehabilitation facility in Amman, Jordan. Abruptly, he stopped and stared at me. His eyes looked sad and vulnerable, as if he were trying to tell me something in our common wordless language. I suddenly felt responsible for telling his story. Before I met Pablito, in 2018, I had been on my way to photograph a little girl named Zahra. She was then a seven-year-old Syrian refugee living in a tented settlement in Jordan. Since 2001 I had used my camera to tell stories of hope, resilience, and survival. Over and over again, I’d visited places shattered by conflict…