Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

In the past three years, this magazine has run 34 stories on climate change— including a special issue devoted entirely to the topic. Our commitment is ongoing. In the April issue, to mark Earth Day, we’ll publish a guide that separates fact from fallacy on climate change and a feature story on how rising temperatures are affecting Alaska. Later this year we’ll offer looks at the Arctic, Antarctica, the Galápagos Islands, and other places at risk as the world warms. Our television channel is airing a documentary film and a three-part series on water issues. And that doesn’t count the hundreds of climate stories we have published on nationalgeographic.com. Covering our climate—where we keep setting records for the hottest year—is one of the most important things we can do. It’s…

Technically it’s ancient technology. But now the two-millennia-old principle of the Greek mathematician Archimedes has been deployed at gargantuan scale. The Three Gorges Dam, China’s marvel on the Yangtze River, is one of the world’s largest engineering projects—the product of 37 million cubic yards of concrete. Its final feature, inaugurated in late 2016, is a new ship lift, a hydraulic seesaw that raises and lowers vessels as many as 371 feet to traverse the dam. Archimedes’ notion was simple: The weight of a buoyant object is equal to the weight of water it displaces. Take two identical chambers filled with equal amounts of water. They will balance on a scale. Add an object—e.g., a ship— to one of them, and let water of an equal weight out. The two chambers…

These frogs put the “group” in “group sex”—and that helps them thrive. Of all vertebrates, gray foam-nest tree frogs exhibit the most extreme form of simultaneous polyandry, or a female mating with multiple males, says behavioral ecologist Phillip Byrne of the University of Wollongong in Australia. After a heavy rain swells pools in the African landscape, male frogs gather in poolside vegetation and call for mates, while females in the pools absorb water through their skin. When she’s hydrated enough, a female heads for an overhanging branch. En route she is amplexed— gripped in a sexual embrace—by a male. The joined pair climb to a nesting site. There the female discharges a watery fluid, whips it to a foam with her back legs, and puts in her eggs. At this…

One time Christopher Tubo caught a 660-pound blue marlin in the South China Sea. That was years ago, when the fishing there was good, he says. He would come home from a trip with dozens of valuable fish like tuna and a haul of other species. “Here there’s none of that,” he says, looking toward the Sulu Sea, where he’s been fishing for the past four years. His two boats, traditional Filipino outriggers called bancas, float in the shallow water nearby, baking in the sun. Tubo sits on a wooden bench in front of his home, which is perched on stilts above the bay. One of his four kids wraps an arm around his leg. Worn T-shirts and shorts flutter on clotheslines behind them. Glancing at his wife, Leah, and…

More people live in cities than ever before. According to the United Nations Population Fund, over half of the world’s citizens now live in an urban area—a figure expected to reach nearly 70 percent by 2050. Globally, one in eight of those city dwellers lives in a megacity, defined by the UN as a place with more than 10 million people. That’s why I started this series, which I call “Metropolis.” I wanted to focus on the UN statistics— and show what they actually look like. So from 2007 to 2015 I photographed megacities and documented the dynamic process of urbanization. I asked myself several questions: How can people live in cities that are so crowded, hectic, and chaotic? What are the differences among these megacities? And what do they…

Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. Andrew Richard Hara Hilo, Hawaii Hara, a professional photographer, had been to the summit of Mauna Kea hundreds of times in search of a clear sky. A meteor shower in July 2014 offered cosmic dramatics. “I think being at only 60 percent oxygen helps me focus on what makes a great image,” he says.…

Humans aren’t the only creatures to use tools. Archerfish shoot water droplets from their mouths to fell insects. Octopuses carry coconut shells to serve as shelter. Orangutans borrow canoes to forage for aquatic plants. “Tool use is widespread and diverse,” says biologist Robert W. Shumaker. But it’s not necessarily a sign of intelligence. “We don’t even attempt to classify examples as thinking or not thinking,” he says. For some animals, like the archerfish, tool use is mostly instinctive: Each individual of the species does it, in the same way. Other animals learn their skills: Before the canoeing orangutans ventured out on the water, they observed how humans used the craft. Differences in animal tool use Each layer represents a mode of tool use. Colored bars next to the animals’ names…

A cold drizzle falls as we shiver in the streets, waiting for the Viking lord and his band of raiders to appear. It’s a raw January night in the old Shetland town of Lerwick, but there’s euphoria in the air. Beside me, a man with two young children laughs as he spots a red smoky haze rising behind the town hall. “Looks like they torched the whole building,” he shouts, to grins all around. Fire, after all, is why we are here. It’s Up Helly Aa, the great incendiary celebration of the Viking past in Shetland. Like everyone else, I’ve come to see a Viking ship burn. As the lord’s squad and dozens of others pour into the street, fire seethes from hundreds of torches. A roar of delight goes…

If it weren’t for a cheeky monkey named Naruto, who, as the story goes, stole a photographer’s camera in an Indonesian park and snapped a selfie, crested black macaques might still be languishing in obscurity. The photo later went viral, and Macaca nigra suddenly had millions of online fans just as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation status of animals, was working toward listing the punk-haired, amber-eyed species as among the world’s 25 most endangered primates. In 2015 Naruto’s selfie sparked a copyright lawsuit including the animal welfare group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—since the monkey took the shot, does he own it?—which could push the boundaries of animal rights. But Naruto’s renown hasn’t earned him special cred with his fellow macaques in…

On the southeastern edge of the Greenland ice sheet, a blast of Arctic wind hit the three kite-skiers. Sarah McNair-Landry’s kite billowed, but with her safety latch jammed, the gust yanked her 20 feet into the air. She dropped headfirst onto the ice, cracking her helmet and briefly blacking out. The accident almost derailed her expedition with kayakers Ben Stookesberry and Erik Boomer—an expedition to kite-ski from east to northwest across Greenland. But the three continued on, wearing skis while harnessed to giant kites designed to catch the wind and propel them across 600 miles of ice. “You’ve got these amazing winds and conditions in Greenland,” says McNair-Landry. “You can travel so much faster and farther, especially while pulling sleds, than you would if you were just skiing.” On some…

Lice have plagued humankind throughout history. Spreading from person to person by close contact, they latch onto hair with hooklike claws and pierce the scalp to suck up a meal of blood. The result is often a very itchy head. Relief comes only with the removal of all traces of infestation—the insects, each about the size of a sesame seed, and the tiny eggs they lay, known as nits. Picking off the parasites one by one is tedious, so many cultures have crafted fine-tooth combs to hasten the job. Combs of wood, bone, and ivory have turned up at ancient sites in the Old World, but solid evidence for such tools in the Americas was lacking until a recent study in northern Chile. That research focused on a museum collection…

BRISTLECONE PINES INYO NATIONAL FOREST, CALIFORNIA Convinced that tree rings could reveal Earth’s climate history, scientist Edmund Schulman spent summers out West hunting the oldest living specimens. He found them in the gnarled, diminutive bristlecone pines. In 1957 Schulman discovered Methuselah, a bristlecone with 4,789 rings. (The ancient tree still stands, its location a guarded secret.) In 1964 another researcher was coring a spectacular specimen in Nevada to determine its age, when the drill bit broke. After the tree was cut down for study and its rings were found to total 4,862, scientists realized that they had unwittingly felled what was then the oldest tree known. THE CHILD - GIVING GINKGO TOKYO, JAPAN Tradition holds that this tree, which stands in the courtyard of the Zoshigaya Kishimojin Temple in Tokyo,…

‘D on’t worry, you can’t get lost down here.’ Larisa Pozdnyakova’s words, in her thick Russian accent, float to me from within the cave’s seemingly endless black void. Apparently, she can read my mind: All I can think about is not getting lost a mile inside the Earth. For the past several hours I’ve struggled to keep up as she leads me deeper into a frozen underworld known as Dark Star. Larisa, a 30-something veteran caver from the Ural Mountains, moves with fluid, snakelike ease along our twisting route, while I grunt and heave my way after her like the clumsy rookie that I am. The cold blackness swallows the light of our headlamps just a few feet from our heads, forcing us to move like moles, scuttling, slithering, feeling…