Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2019 i National Geographic Magazine

Rocks from space regularly rain down on our planet, but only a few survive the fall. At Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies, some 40,000 meteorite remnants—such as the rare metal-and-crystal pallasite below—are stored in a humiditycontrolled facility. The goal is to keep them free of contamination so future generations can study them for clues to how our solar system formed, and how we might one day survive in space.…

BY THE NUMBERS 213 HEIGHT OF TOTEM POLE, IN FEET 10+ AVERAGE RAINY DAYS IN SEPTEMBER 1968 YEAR THE ROCK WAS FIRST CLIMBED ‘IF ANY OF US HAD FALLEN IN, IT WAS A GUARANTEED FATALITY WITH THOSE CONDITIONS.’—KrystleWright THE IDEA TO SHOOT an ascent of the Totem Pole, a stone tower in Tasmania, came to adventure photographer Krystle Wright in a dream. Years later, as she dangled from a line she’d rigged across nearby rocks, with a drone lighting the scene from above, she finally got her shot. THREE MONTHS OUT AN UNSEEN ROUTE Jutting from the waters along the Tasman Peninsula, the Totem Pole is one of the world’s most dramatic column climbs. The sea stack is often photographed from the more accessible north side; Wright wanted to capture…

FOR NEARLY SEVEN YEARS I have been walking with migrants. ¶ In the winter of 2013 I set out from an ancient Homo sapiens fossil site called Herto Bouri, in the north of Ethiopia, and began retracing, on foot, the defining journey of humankind: our first colonization of the Earth during the Stone Age. ¶ My long walk is about storytelling. I report what I see at boot level along the pathways of our original discovery of the planet. From the start, I knew my route would be vague. Anthropologists suggest that our species first stepped out of Africa 600 centuries ago and eventually wandered, more or less aimlessly, to the tip of South America—the last unknown edge of the continents and my own journey’s finish line. We were roving…

THE SET IS SIMPLE: a little fabric, a chair, maybe some flowers. Its inhabitants are more complex: an American mother who takes her children to visit their Mexican father every weekend. A recent deportee trying to rebuild his life. They pause what they’re doing, sit for a portrait, and leave with a printed copy. Behind the camera is Alexia Webster, a South African photographer who sets up street studios around the world. At Studio Transfronterizo, her project in Tijuana, Mexico, passing characters offer a glimpse of life on the world’s busiest land border. ¶ Every day nearly 100,000 people—commuters, students, visitors—legally cross from Tijuana to San Diego, California, at the San Ysidro border. Webster built her first studio in Tijuana near a café where new arrivals often stop for legal…

One night years ago, biologist Albert Manville drove to a garbage dump near Lake Louise in Alberta’s Banff National Park. THE SITE WAS UNFENCED back then, and grizzlies often came to rummage for leftovers. Manville was watching a bear feast on a hefty scrap of meat when he noticed movement toward the edge of his car’s beaming headlights. It was a wolverine, staring intently at the bear and the meat. What else could it do? It weighed maybe 30 pounds; the grizzly weighed several hundred. “Then all at once the wolverine ran up and bit the bear right on the butt,” Manville says. “The grizzly whirled and swiped with a paw, but the wolverine was already racing around to one side. It grabbed the meat and ran off into the…

FIVE YEARS AGO I spent a few days with National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek, a writer who is walking around the world, retracing the journey begun when modern humans first left Africa. Salopek’s walking 21,000 miles; I joined him for five miles I’ll never forget. In Şanliurfa, a dusty town in southern Turkey that is reputed to be the birthplace of Abraham, we found ourselves in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. Everywhere we looked, we saw Syrian refugees—in throngs on the streets, in small apartments crammed with multiple families. We saw people unable to find work of any kind, no matter their skills or education. We talked with people scared and scarred by their country’s brutal civil war; we heard stories of suffering, rape, torture, and other horrific crimes.…

For exotic beauty, few flowers rival the ghost orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii). These rare orchids have long nectar tubes into which moths stick their tonguelike proboscises to reach a sugary reward. As they feed, moths rub against a pollen source and pick up grains they’ll transfer to other orchids they visit. It’s long been thought that only one insect, the giant sphinx moth, had a long enough proboscis to pollinate these orchids—but new images and research refute that. Photographers Carlton Ward, Jr., and Mac Stone, working with biologists Mark Danaher (of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and Peter Houlihan, spent years preparing and fine-tuning remote cameras. The payoff: photos of two other moth species with pollen on their bodies visiting ghost orchids in Florida parks (above, a streaked sphinx in…

TERRY MARTIN CARVED HIS FIRST SURFBOARD at age 14, and tens of thousands more during the next 60 years. That put him in the elite ranks of the board artisans known as shapers (Surfing Magazine recognized just 720 of them in the past 100 years). Since Martin’s death in 2012, his son Josh, bottom right, has carried on the tradition. Today’s shapers craft surfboards with modern materials such as polyurethane foam or with wood such as the balsa and coast redwood (the stripe) seen here. Josh fashions boards for world-class competitive surfers, using tools that he and his dad once shared. 1. Power planer A shaper’s primary tool, this planer creates the board’s tapered silhouette and “rocker,” the curve that makes nose and tail slightly higher than the middle. 2.…

WHEN YOUSSOUF WALKS in the southern Spanish town of Lepe, where he is living for now inside an abandoned slaughterhouse, he greets in passing the other Africans he recognizes: the Senegalese, the Nigerians, the men from Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. He is fluent in French and has learned good Spanish, but with Malians like himself the exchanges are in Bambara, which requires more elaborate courtesies. Is your extended family fine? Yes, they are well. Your close family is fine? They also are well. And your wife? She is well. ¶ Youssouf likes to wear a short-brimmed hat and sunglasses outdoors. His clothes and shoes are clean whenever he’s on the streets; there’s hot water in the slaughterhouse, where aid workers have improvised a migrant shelter amid the concrete stalls. Youssouf…

THE IDEA THAT THERE WERE ONCE “pure” populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States. ¶ Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. ¶ The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis…

IT’S LAST LIGHT IN THE VALLEY, and the sound of rushing water drowns out all others. I walk the river’s edge with my dog, Mosi, whose inability to hear over the cascade makes him nervous. Despite his impressive size, he trots sheepishly at my heels. Ostensibly we walk to fish, but really we move at the urging of naturalists long since passed—of John Burroughs and John Muir, of Loren Eiseley—and of my parents, Norman and Paula, who are alive today but live far from this Kenyan vale. Walk in the woods, their voices advise, along the banks of a river where, in the blue end of a day, you may find the rhythms that elude you. There, among the fish and the flowers and the forces that bind them, you…

The ebb and flow of people across borders has long shaped our world. Data from the past 50 years of international migration help us understand why people make the choice to leave and where they go. Less than 10 percent of these migrants are forced to flee; most are seeking a better life and move only when they can afford to. Global migrants totaled fewer than 100 million in the 1960s, and although the number has increased substantially since then, it remains a fraction of the world’s 7.6 billion people today. WHEN EMIGRATION IS HIGHER Black indicates more people leaving a country than foreign-born residents staying. WHEN IMMIGRATION IS HIGHER White indicates more foreign-born residents in a country than people leaving. 258 MILLION PEOPLE IN 2017 LIVED OUTSIDE THEIR COUNTRY…

Waves of African migrants have come to Spain in recent decades, most of them enticed by Spanish demand for foreign labor, some by the need to escape instability or conflict. Nearly a million Africans now call Spain home. SEEKING REFUGE LEADING COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN F OR AFRICAN REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS IN SPAIN (1991–2017) 1. Algeria A 1992 military coup and 10-year civil war between the Algerian government and Islamist groups sent thousands fleeing to Spain. 2. Mali Rebellion in the north and a coup in 2012 led to refugee departures and the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands. 3. Somalia Thousands have fled Somalia due to ongoing armed conflict since 1991, as well as periods of severe drought and famine. 4. Equatorial Guinea Decades of authoritarian rule drove political…

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew lie in a curve of the Thames, seven miles upriver from central London. It’s a pastoral respite from asphalt and exhaust, with thousands of plants collected from the British Empire’s far-flung reach. To stroll past beds of Himalayan rhododendrons and Tasmanian grasses is to also understand the sweep of Britain’s connectivity to the world beyond. At Kew, though, one does not entirely escape the tumult of modern life. The gardens sit directly beneath the flight path into Heathrow. As I admired a massive, ancient oak, relocated from Iran during Queen Victoria’s reign, a stream of jets descended out of the holding queue aloft. Spaced 27 to 40 seconds apart—Kew arborists know the timing—they formed a line homing in on the busiest two-runway airport on…

The town of Sa Dec, Vietnam, is known for its sprawling flower farms, which are particularly vibrant before the Lunar New Year celebrations each winter. Apicella visited the town to photograph the colorful plants and the way they’re traditionally grown: on raised racks to control exposure to water, and tended by boat. One evening, just before sunset, a daisy farmer invited Apicella to take pictures of his fields. While the farmer watered his plants, Apicella launched his drone above the man and lined up the rows at perfect angles. Later, as he sipped tea with the farmer and his family, he took a closer look at the scene he had captured, with the striking swirl of water. The man’s three children were especially excited to see what Apicella had photographed.…