Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2018 i National Geographic Magazine

‘LAKE WATER PERCOLATES THROUGH THE SAND, SO YOU CAN DRINK FRESHWATER OUT OF YOUR FOOT STEPS AS YOU WALK AROUND.’—George Steinmetz T MINUS SIX MONTHS GEARING UP For a project to photograph the world’s extreme deserts, I wanted to visit the giant sand dunes in China’s Inner Mongolia. The only way into the Gobi is on foot or by camel. The Chinese military controls access, so I teamed up with Chinese scientists studying desertification. The plan was that I’d fly over the dunes and they’d follow on camel. Six months beforehand I went to Beijing to pick up the permits and arrange for a caravan to meet us at the edge of the desert. T MINUS TWO WEEKS ESSENTIAL PACKING LIST I did test flights each week before leaving to…

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE QUEEN—the ant queen, that is—because mating does wonders for her immune system. When exposure to a low dose of a bacterium or virus builds an organism’s resistance to a later high dose of the same pathogen, it’s called immune priming. To study immune priming in invertebrates, Swiss and Panamanian researchers chose two that have plenty of time to build immunity: Lasius niger (below) and Formica selysi ant queens, which may live more than 20 years. Each species’ queens were sorted into two groups: the young virgin “princesses” and the mated queens—females that have mated with a male drone and stashed the proceeds in a “sperm pocket” from which they’ll fertilize tens of millions of eggs in a lifetime. The researchers cultured a fungus that, in…

If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America—and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks—their plastic trash would likely still be around, four centuries later. If the Pilgrims had been like many people today and simply tossed their empty bottles and wrappers over the side, Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world’s oceans today, sponging up toxins to add to the ones already in them, waiting to be eaten by some hapless fish or oyster, and ultimately perhaps by one of us. We should give thanks that the Pilgrims didn’t have plastic, I thought recently as I rode a train to Plymouth along…

ON A BOAT OFF COSTA RICA, a biologist uses pliers from a Swiss army knife to try to extract a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nostril. The turtle writhes in agony, bleeding profusely. For eight painful minutes the YouTube video ticks on; it has logged more than 20 million views, even though it’s so hard to watch. At the end the increasingly desperate biologists finally manage to dislodge a four-inch-long straw from the creature’s nose. Raw scenes like this, which lay bare the toll of plastic on wildlife, have become familiar: The dead albatross, its stomach bursting with refuse. The turtle stuck in a six-pack ring, its shell warped from years of straining against the tough plastic. The seal snared in a discarded fishing net. But most of the…

Sometimes the sounds of a vocalist warming up drift through the lush aviaries of Umgeni River Bird Park. The prima donna in question? A parrot named Molly. The blue-fronted amazon learned to sing scales from a former owner. Many of the parrots at this zoo and breeding center in Durban, South Africa, are rescues, given up by people unprepared for the challenges of owning a large, needy bird. Not only are parrots loud and destructive; some are as smart as a three-year-old child, and some can live 80 years. Even so, the draw to keep parrots—what conservation ecologist Stuart Marsden calls the “humans of the bird world”—can be irresistible. Highly social and intelligent, the birds create meaningful, powerful bonds with their owners. Combine that with their ability to mimic human…

SPANISH EXPANSION Spain colonized Florida’s eastern coast in the mid-1500s in an attempt to counter French encroachment. JAMESTOWN STRUGGLES The Virginia Company’s outpost, a private venture, almost failed before its cash crop—tobacco—piqued England’s interest. In 1624 Virginia became a royal colony. SPANISH ASSAULT Attacking from San Agustín, Spanish Catholic soldiers marched to Fort Caroline and massacred over 300 French Protestant settlers in 1565. FRENCH RETREAT The French focused on the north after their Florida colonies were sacked by the Spanish. Québec was their first permanent settlement on the St. Lawrence River. PURITANS OF PLYMOUTH Low on supplies after harsh sailing conditions, Puritan separatists fleeing the Church of England abandoned their Virginia route in favor of Massachusetts. ROANOKE MYSTERY The Anglo-Spanish War delayed a relief expedition to the English colony. Searchers…

SOME PEOPLE DENY CLIMATE CHANGE, BUT THERE ARE NO OCEAN PLASTIC DENIERS. THE PROBLEM’S IN PLAIN SIGHT. It’s hard to get your head around the story of plastic. The facts and figures are so staggering as to seem almost fantastical. Can it really be true that half the plastic ever made was produced in the past 15 years? That a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year, with an average “working life” of just 15 minutes? And that estimates for how long plastic endures range from 450 years to forever? The answer, unfortunately, is yes—those grim facts, and more, are all true. That’s why we asked writer Laura Parker and photographer Randy Olson to put this global crisis in perspective. Plastics, of course, are a great thing. As Parker…

WORLD RESHAPED 01 200 MILLION YEARS AGO Early dinosaurs roamed the last supercontinent, Pangaea, formed by the collision of older continents. 02 100 MILLION YEARS AGO As Pangaea divided into distinct landmasses, the coasts of today’s continents began to emerge, along with the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. 03 PRESENT DAY Today’s landscape is a blip in geologic time. The Atlantic Ocean widens by an inch a year as plates under it spread apart, forming new crust. 04 100 MILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE Plate activity along eastern North America will cause the Atlantic Ocean to shrink and continents to converge. 05 250 MILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE Only a vestige of the Atlantic Ocean remains as landmasses are joined together into a new supercontinent. New high mountains mark the sites…

When photographer Mandy Barker returned to the English beach where she collected shells as a child, she found a baby’s car seat and a refrigerator among piles of plastic waste. She also noticed an air of indifference: It seemed to her that people weren’t fazed by seeing a beach strewn with litter. So she changed the context. By collecting pieces of plastic waste and photographing them on a plain background, Barker found that the trash became shocking again. “I wanted to create something that would resonate,” she says. That impulse has led to a series of photographic projects that illuminate plastic’s ubiquity as well as its reach—how printer cartridges that spilled off a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, for example, washed up on beaches from North Africa to Norway. Or…

IN A LABORATORY AT Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, New York, Debra Lee Magadini positions a slide under a microscope and flicks on an ultraviolet light. Scrutinizing the liquefied digestive tract of a shrimp she bought at a fish market, she makes a tsk-ing sound. After examining every millimeter of the slide, she blurts, “This shrimp is fiber city!” Inside its gut, seven squiggles of plastic, dyed with Nile red stain, fluoresce. All over the world, researchers like Magadini are staring through microscopes at tiny pieces of plastic—fibers, fragments, or microbeads—that have made their way into marine and freshwater species, both wild caught and farmed. Scientists have found microplastics in 114 aquatic species, and more than half of those end up on our dinner plates. Now they are…

34° 05' 08" N, 74°48 ' 20" E FARZAN SHEIKH was in his bedroom doing his ninth-grade math homework when he heard a commotion outside. It was late in the afternoon of March 28, 2017, and a funeral procession was passing by in his neighborhood in Srinagar, in the part of Kashmir that’s administered by India. Curiosity drew the then 16-year-old into the street, where he glimpsed a shrouded corpse carried by mourners. Then he heard pro-Kashmiri slogans and saw Indian police use tear gas and pellet-firing shotguns to scatter the crowd. Sheikh ran toward the narrow alley leading to his home. “I saw a policeman with a gun aiming at me, and he shot directly at me,” he said. “That was the last thing I saw.” The schoolboy fell…

BENEATH A SINGLE PATCH of forest soil lies a vast interconnected web of life. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard likens it to a kind of hidden intelligence. By tracking specific chemicals, she and other scientists observed how trees in the Douglas fir forests of Canada “talk,” forming underground symbiotic relationships—called mycorrhizae—with fungi to relay stress signals and share resources with one another. LOST CONNECTIONS By sharing resources, networked forests with healthy hub trees become more resilient. Researchers examined fungal DNA to map connections in a Canadian forest (A) and found that the selective removal of hub trees (B)—by loggers, for example, or from an insect invasion—could cause more connections to be lost than if trees were removed randomly. Clear-cutting would destroy all links.…

David Doubilet: Gardens of the Queen National Park is a marine sanctuary formed by a necklace of keys, mangrove islets, and reefs about 60 miles south of mainland Cuba. On a previous assignment with my wife and photographic partner, Jennifer Hayes, we’d documented healthy coral reefs pulsing with fish and sharks, and mangroves patrolled by crocodiles. We knew that time, increased tourism, and climate change could alter the 850-square-mile national park—so 15 years later, we returned to see how it was faring. We were in a mangrove channel photographing Cassiopeia, aka the upside-down jellyfish. Jennifer, her back to me, was focused on a specimen above her. Out of the corner of my viewfinder, I saw a sizable American crocodile drifting downstream. As I began to take its photograph, I realized…

The bush plane lurched off the gravel airstrip, banked slowly over the village of Kaktovik, and was soon a yellow dot soaring over a brown sea of tundra—and perhaps the most contested real estate in the United States. The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wild-life Refuge (ANWR) has been for millennia the summer home of hordes of caribou and migratory birds, the winter home of polar bears, and a hunting ground for Alaska natives. It also may hide some 7.7 billion barrels of oil, and therein lies the problem. When Congress created the 19.3-million-acre refuge in 1980, the nation was facing its second oil crisis in less than a decade. So lawmakers postponed deciding the fate of a potentially oil-rich area, covering 1.5 million acres, of the coastal plain.…

FROM THE ENGLISH SHIP HOPEWELL ANCHORED OFF THE COAST OF WHAT IS NOW NORTH CAROLINA, GOVERNOR JOHN WHITE WATCHED WITH ELATION AS A COLUMN OF SMOKE ROSE INTO THE SUMMER DUSK. The plume from Roanoke Island “put us in good hope that some of the colony were there expecting my return out of England,” he wrote later. Three years had passed since the governor had set out from the first English settlement in the New World on what was to be a brief resupply mission, leaving behind more than a hundred men, women, and children. But his return voyage had been delayed again and again by the outbreak of war with Spain. At last, on August 18, 1590, White and a party of sailors waded ashore on Roanoke Island. According…