Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i National Geographic Magazine

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

Well before dawn, near the Little Snake River in southern Wyoming, Pat and Sharon O’Toole’s pickup bounces up a broad, sage-covered valley, where the family has run livestock for five generations. Pat turns off the headlights and rolls toward a clearing. Under a moon that’s just past full, we make out dozens of white dots, hopping up and down on the dark plain. The sage grouse have been dancing all night. As the morning light grows over the eastern mountains, the outlandish mating ritual comes into view. The knee-high males strut around, puffing their white-feathered chests and splaying their tails. They chase one another and spar in a flurry of beating wings, heaving chests, and loud thunking. Meanwhile the females—smaller birds with brindled gray feathers that blend with sage and…

FISH AND TARO were the only food Milagros Ribero, 35, and her family could find in their little community in the Orinoco River Delta, home of the Warao, the second largest indigenous group in Venezuela. In June they made the 500-mile journey to Brazil. “We came searching for food,” Ribero says near her tent in the Janokoida shelter, recently set up for the Warao in the Brazilian border town of Pacaraima. Each day hundreds of struggling Venezuelans arrive at the border, carrying stuff on their backs and documents in their hands. Those seeking refuge have sold TVs, cell phones, clothes—everything they own—to pay for the trip. They hope to find food, medicine, safety, and jobs in Brazil, basics they no longer can get in their home country because of its…

The Ilısu Dam is one of the largest of the now 29 planned dams that form the backbone of a decades-long infrastructure project in Turkey. When the dam is finished, 2.7 trillion gallons of water are expected to flood up to 120 square miles of land along the Tigris River, including the village of Hasankeyf, an ancient Silk Road trading post still rich with antiquities and historical significance. POLITICAL FALLOUT Turkey lacks the oil and gas resources of neighboring Syria and Iraq, but it does have water. Iraqis, facing recent serious droughts, worry about Turkey’s ability to block more water from the Tigris. LOST CITY Hasankeyf is among the world’s oldest inhabited settlements, with a history dating back 12,000 years. A plan to relocate residents to a “New Hasankeyf” on…

NASA’S INSIGHT LANDER IS EXPECTED to set down along the sunny equator of Mars in late November. Its mission: Study Mars’s ancient interior, a task that might shed some light on our own planet. That’s because the same plate tectonics that give Earth its mountain ranges—and the conditions for life itself—have over eons transformed our ancient geology. Mars, on the other hand, has had a comparatively uneventful past three billion years, likely because it’s too small to produce the energy for history-erasing tectonic shifts. So it might still hold clues to how rocky worlds, like ours, first formed and evolved. CORE QUESTIONS Using instruments that measure seismic activity, wobble, and internal heat, the lander seeks to find out what makes up the core of Mars. 1 Seismic activity A seismometer…

THREATENED HISTORY Petroglyphs and pictographs—images carved and painted onto rock—bear witness to the long and abiding connection of Native Americans to Bears Ears. The images here span millennia. They were made by nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Archaic period, which ended with the adoption of agriculture by about 1500 B.C.; by the Basketmakers, the first sedentary farmers, between 500 B.C. and A.D. 750; by ancestral Pueblo people, who built large cliffside settlements but migrated out of the region at the end of the 13th century; and by Ute and Navajo, who moved in later from the north and remain there today. Archaeologists have barely begun to interpret the enigmatic and irreplaceable art of the Bears Ears region. Isolation once protected it, but the recent influx of visitors has subjected some works…

The warming is changing what animals eat, where they rest, and how they raise their young. ONLINE Visit ngm.com/Nov2018 to see videos made by the National Geographic team as they traveled along the Antarctic Peninsula in 2017 on Dion Poncet’s boat. Dion Poncet came of age in a place almost no one calls home. HE WAS BORN ON A SAILBOAT in Leith Harbour, an abandoned whaling station on South Georgia island. His father, a French adventurer, had met his mother, an Australian zoologist, on a jetty in Tasmania while sailing his boat around the world. The couple started a family in the South Atlantic. For years they traversed the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, surveying wildlife in uncharted bays—seals, flowering plants, seabirds—with three boys in tow. Dion was the…

As the sea ice season off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula shrinks, species that rely on the ice will have to adapt or perish. The loss of ice could also reduce krill populations. Many species consume these tiny crustaceans, which for now are still abundant. Sea change Global warming is heating deep waters circulating from northern oceans. As winds blow away colder surface water, the warmer waters rise from below, making sea ice and glacial ice thinner. A warming climate also increases storminess, which pushes sea ice south. Prey under pressure The ice-free fishing season now extends deeper into fall. Strict quotas limit krill catch size, but the shorter sea ice season and the longer fishing season could put humans and wildlife in more competition for the same…

This is childhood malnutrition at life-size: Each of these children is severely malnourished—and the red circle around each photo equals the circumference of that child’s arm. The circle is much larger if a child is not malnourished, as the key below shows. Despite some gains against global hunger, malnutrition in children under age five left 22.2 percent of them stunted (too short for their age) and 7.5 percent of them wasted (too thin for their height) in 2017. UNICEF’s Diane Holland says catching acute malnutrition early is key to bringing children back to healthy growth. The “MUAC bracelet” (right), used to measure mid-upper-arm circumference, helps gauge the severity of acute malnutrition so a child can be given lifesaving treatment and care. MUAC (MID-UPPER-ARM CIRCUMFERENCE) HUNGRIEST COUNTRIES Food scarcity and malnutrition…

DO YOU KNOW THE CURRENT phase of the moon? Most of us don’t have any idea; nowadays we hardly need to know. But before there were streetlamps and electric lights everywhere, people watched the night sky diligently. So when a very bright comet appeared in 1607, people were frightened and fascinated. German astronomer Johannes Kepler thought deeply about what he saw that year. He reasoned that the spectacular tail of what we now call Halley’s comet (named after English scientist Edmond Halley, who computed its orbit) was probably caused by the sun’s warmth somehow evaporating or liberating material from the comet’s surface. Kepler imagined exploring those star scapes: “Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast…

Two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, are treasured by many but are also politically contested. In 2017 President Donald Trump ordered the monuments shrunk by approximately 85 percent and 46 percent, respectively, paving the way for resource extraction and setting off a challenge in the courts. The newly opened regions are steeped in Native American history and archaeological sites—but also in coal and uranium. GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT • Proclaimed by President Bill Clinton on September 18, 1996: 1.87 million acres• Reduced by Trump on December 4, 2017, to one million acres GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE: DEEP COAL DEPOSITS An estimated 62 billion tons of coal lie in the Kaiparowits Plateau, major areas of which are now no longer part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The coal deposits…

CRICKETS! IN CHIPS, ENERGY BARS & OTHER PROCESSED FOODS If you’re picturing insects in your future diet, trade that image of a tarantula-ona-stick for one of a smoothie. “We’re not going to replace meat with bugs,” says Julie Lesnik, author of Edible Insects and Human Evolution. Insects can be an ingredient in animal feed or the processed foods we know: chips, protein bars, and smoothie powders. “It’s bugs, but it’s food,” Lesnik says. “It can become an ingredient like anything else.” Peer into the future of what we eat, and you’ll start wondering what could happen to our meals. As the world’s population surpasses nine billion by mid-century, our food needs will grow by 50 percent. How do we meet them without mowing down more forests or expanding industrial agriculture, one…

Hasankeyf is a 12,000-year-old village carved into a plateau flanking the Tigris River. It looks like something out of a surreal fairy tale. Overlooking the town are caves crafted by Neolithic pioneers and the ruins of a citadel as old as the Byzantines. The settlement bears traces of the Romans. It’s the site of significant medieval Islamic architecture, including a bridge across the Tigris that established it as an important outpost along the Silk Road. Marco Polo may have crossed there on his way to China. Hasankeyf is also an active town in southeastern Turkey, with markets and gardens and mosques and cafés—a place with a palpable feeling of historical continuity and survival. Yet in 2006 the Turkish government officially began work on a giant dam across the Tigris River…

A Nikon D3S camera with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens with a 1.7x converter Yosaitis spent her honeymoon on a safari in Tanzania and Kenya. After leaving the Ngorongoro Crater, she and her new husband came upon a herd of about 25 giraffes. Most giraffes they’d seen had been eating tree leaves, which obscured a clean shot. But this particular herd stood under a clear blue sky, which complemented the animals’ tawny coats. Yosaitis asked their driver to approach the giraffes slowly. The driver steered the safari truck off the main road (despite his concern about falling into a warthog burrow) and positioned the vehicle with the sun behind it. Two male giraffes began necking, a behavior of combative neck-swinging, likely used to establish dominance. Yosaitis caught the moment—less than a…