Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från National Geographic Magazine

HUMAN INGENUITY IS a beautiful thing, and the subject of this month’s cover story is a case in point. It’s believed that we figured out how to make glass about 4,500 years ago, perhaps during the production of ceramic or metal, when the right combination of silica, soda ash, and limestone happened to come together and reach the temperature necessary to transform. An accident was decoded and mastered, and glass became an indispensable part of our lives. In the millennia since, of course, our use of glass has continued to evolve. What started as beads, trinkets, vials, and bowls turned into windows and eyeglasses and mirrors—and then into telescopes, cameras, televisions, and the smartphone screens we all frequently tap on. Today what’s exciting is how cutting-edge technology is powering our…

CLIMBER ALEX HONNOLD has scaled rock faces around the world, including his famous free solo of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park. But a more recent climb, documented in the new series Arctic Ascent, took him somewhere new and extremely cold. Assisting with the research of glaciologist Heïdi Sevestre, Honnold and climber Hazel Findlay (both shown above, with Honnold in red) led the first ever ascent of Greenland’s 3,750-foottall rock wall known as Ingmikortilaq. Before reaching the summit, the team—joined by guide Adam Mike Kjeldsen and adventurer Aldo Kane—trekked for five days while dragging a sled of equipment to collect glacier melt data from hard-to-reach parts of the ice sheet. Honnold, who usually climbs shirtless and in shorts, was pushed beyond his comfort zone. Enveloped in three jackets, three…

I’M STANDING on a steel walkway 440 feet above Sydney Harbour when a voice crackles over my headset. My guide tells me to look right and take in one of the world’s most stunning skylines. The view: the familiar clamshell roof of the Sydney Opera House and the ferries crisscrossing the sparkling water. Below me, cars and trains rumble across the world’s tallest steel-arch span. But up here, as twilight descends, with my head nearly in the clouds, it feels as if I’m floating over a toy city. I now see why scaling the Sydney Harbour Bridge ranks as one of Australia’s most popular activities, attracting more than four million climbers since the first customer stepped onto its steel beams 25 years ago. The climb has helped make the bridge…

I FOLLOWED A PATH made soft by years of fallen needles through a hemlock forest. Up ahead a glow looked as if a fire had been struck in a patch of forest duff. It was sunlight, not fire, shining from an opening in the trees where a small pool bounced the light back into the air. This shallow saucer of water was a vernal pool. It was what I’d come for. The day was late in spring, a warm afternoon, and the water in the pool had already begun to contract. Vernal pools depend primarily on rainwater and the runoff from the forest uplands. They have no permanent inlet or outlet. They are small, just a few feet deep, and often strung along the forest floor like reverse archipelagoes. As the…

DANGLING ON A ROPE SOME 40 FEET UP, AMID A LABYRINTH of leafy tree limbs, I looked down and questioned my sanity for asking the two men far below to hoist me into the canopy of this rainforest. One of them, photographer Tim Laman, had tied a line to an arrow and shot it over a high bough. Then he and his assistant rigged a pulley system to lift me to a place few humans get to visit. With each of their heaves, the rope squeaked and the branch above bounced precariously. The aim of this adventure was to reach a high crotch in a 150-foot-tall Shorea tree, whose genus includes some of the world’s tallest. A spot among its high branches would offer an ideal view of one of the…

FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO A California-based photographer who focuses on space and technology WHERE Hat Creek, California WHAT Phase One XF camera with a 50mm lens While on assignment for a story about the search for extraterrestrial life, Lowell visited the Allen Telescope Array. The 42 radio dishes in Northern California collectively form a single telescope that scans broad sections of the sky at multiple wavelengths to identify possible signals from technologically advanced life-forms on distant exoplanets. Lowell captured a technician servicing one of the instruments. With only the man’s legs visible, Lowell says, it looked like he too “was actively searching for something.” National Geographic has more than 457 million Instagram followers. Join them here: @natgeo, @natgeotravel, @natgeointhefield, @natgeoadventure, @natgeoyourshot, @natgeotv, @natgeowild, @natgeodocs.…

On April 8, 2024, the moon will slide between Earth and the sun, turning day to dusk above the ribbon of North America swept by a total solar eclipse. For people whose vision impairments prevent them from seeing it, astronomers at Harvard University have developed LightSound, a smartphone-size device that uses sonification to translate ambient brightness to sound. The piping of a flute represents bright light, a clarinet indicates when the partial eclipse begins, and soft clicking tones mark totality—that eerie darkness spanning the hundred-or-more-mile wide band of Earth under the moon’s shadow. April’s path of totality reaches states from Texas to Maine. The LightSound Project will distribute some 500 devices to museums, national and state parks, and schools for the blind across the country. Harvard’s Astronomy Lab manager, Allyson…

CAT AND MOUSE. Eternal adversaries, ever alert to each other’s maneuvers, playing a deadly game of, well, you know. But what if these two combatants were outfitted like history’s warring humans, dressed as, say, Japanese samurai or Tudor-era knights? Canadian artist Jeff de Boer explores this fanciful conceit by making museum-quality armor for cats and mice—not for the animals to wear but for people to enjoy. Since the 1980s, he’s created about 800 suits, transforming ordinary metal into masterpieces that are “small but mighty.”…

ON A BRISK MARCH AFTERNOON, Kazuhiko Akiba and a colleague stood in the courtyard of the Chiba Kogaku glass factory in Japan, ready to unveil their latest creation. A forklift wheeled out a large clay pot about the size of a hot tub and set it down before them. Dressed in the company’s sky blue uniforms, the men put on safety glasses and gloves. Then each grabbed a sledgehammer, hefted it overhead, and slammed it against the outer edges of the pot. Their blows landed with solid thwacks, chipping away heavy ceramic to reveal the prized contents beneath: a hard, luminous substance that caught the afternoon sun. It glowed in pale cerulean hues, like Arctic ice. Akiba, the factory director, stepped back in admiration. “Kirei,” he said. Beautiful. This was…

SMALL POOLS, BIG CONNECTIONS Hundreds of species of animals, mostly migratory, can be found in vernal pools. Certain frogs, fairy shrimps, and salamanders largely depend on the pools for breeding. Life span Average number of eggs laid Typical adult migration distance Size Fairy Shrimp* 50-90 days None 100s 0.5-1 inch In the dry season, eggs lie dormant. Viable for years, the crustacean eggs hatch when pool waters return—and for a life span lasting only as long as the pool does. Wood Frog 3-5 years 435 ft 1,000 2-3 in Their bodies are adapted to partially freeze when hibernating under forest leaf litter. After waking, adults travel to pools to deposit egg masses that soon turn into tadpoles. Spotted Salamander 15-20 years 390 ft 20-100 6-8 in These amphibians emerge from…

BORNEO’S FORESTS Over the past 50 years, the island has lost more than a third of its old-growth forests. Most of its remaining intact forests exist in higher elevations. Gunung Palung is one of Borneo’s few protected lowland areas. Outside threats Industrial farms cut down large areas of rainforest to grow crops, including oil palm, bananas, and rice. This process often involves draining peatland, which dries out the landscape and increases fire risk. Wildfires have caused damage and deforestation outside the park. ONE PARK, MANY FORESTS The park is composed of several distinct forest types, defined by the soils and environs they grow in. They range from salt-tolerant coastal mangroves to lowland peat swamps to the small trees of montane forests. *MUCH OF THE OLD-GROWTH FOREST IN THESE AREAS WAS LOST…

A humpback whale named Frodo set a species record by traveling 7,000 miles across the Pacific. Prior to that journey, he was spotted in the Bering Sea off Russia, far from the known path of humpbacks that breed in Mexico. Using Happywhale, an identification database, biologist Nicola Ransome and colleagues found that 117 other whales made similar trips, showing that migration is more complex than we thought.…

He advocates for the Amazon’s ‘pink ambassadors.’ The alarms last September from Brazil’s Lago de Tefé first reached Fernando Trujillo by phone—his colleagues, fellow scientists, calling him in a panic. The brutal 2023 summer had been heating the Amazonia lake to temperatures far beyond anything previously recorded, and as they had feared, something was now happening to the pink river dolphins. “Three dead dolphins,” Trujillo remembers. “Then five dead dolphins. Then 70 dead, in one day.” For Trujillo, a Colombian marine biologist and National Geographic Explorer who’s become a global advocate for river dolphins, the Tefé disaster must be understood as both a tragedy and a much needed lesson in the vulnerability of these freshwater ambassadors. Over just a few days, 157 dolphins—10 percent of the lake’s population—died in that…

ON A MILD SATURDAY MORNING IN EARLY JUNE, Jamie Tezbir braced herself for a grievous decision. She was making her second trip to the emergency room in a week. Hospital runs had become routine for Jamie and her husband, Don, for nearly a decade. But this time felt different. Their son Jackson, then nine years old, had been born with lissencephaly, an incurable brain malformation that triggers frequent seizures. Through the night and into that morning, the attacks had come every 20 minutes. And now his breathing was in severe distress. Jamie and Don had recently signed a do-not-resuscitate order; should Jackson go into cardiac arrest, it would be abided by. But were they receptive to intubation? ICU doctors and anesthesiologists stood ready. “It was one of those scary moments,” Jamie…

DIVING beneath a white cathedral of ice, I could hear the shrill whistles, honks, and squeaks of harp seals. They could easily have been mistaken for the sounds of a rainforest—except I was in the frigid waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Around me, adult harp seals gracefully soared through their private underworld. On a ceiling of ice above us rested thousands of newborn pups. I was in the Magdalen Islands, an archipelago in the gulf, in March 2011. Together with my partner, David Doubilet, I had set out to photograph harp seals as part of a comprehensive story on the marine ecosystem of the Gulf of St. Lawrence—an alcove of the North Atlantic Ocean—where the waters teem with life. Historically in winter, the gulf’s pack ice transforms into…