Innholdsfortegnelse for OCTOBER 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

ANTON SEIMON Atmospheric scientist On May 31, 2013, the day the widest tornado ever recorded swept through central Oklahoma and killed 22 people, Anton Seimon was about three miles south. Several of the people killed were Seimon’s colleagues, including National Geographic Explorer Tim Samaras, whose vehicle was tumbled nearly a mile by the tornado’s 175-mile-an-hour gusts. When the wind stopped, Seimon was left with his grief— and more questions than answers. Why did this storm wreak such havoc? He wanted to reconstruct how the storm destroyed everything in its path, including Samaras’s truck. He began to acquire videos shot that day in hopes that, all together, they’d form a detailed portrait of the storm. More than 125 videos later, the footage— when synchronized—shows the storm from nearly every angle. Most advances…

Amid talk in the United States about building walls and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, refugees keep streaming into Europe. We see the pictures. A dead child washed up on a Turkish beach. Desperate people—most from the Middle East and Africa—adrift in European towns, warehoused in refugee camps, crowding train stations. In this magazine and on our website, photographs document the chaos as thousands flee civil war and ISIS in Syria to an unknown future elsewhere. We study the numbers: Last year Germany took in 1.1 million refugees—many of them from Syria. To put that in context with its population of roughly 82 million, it would be as if 4.5 million refugees, in one year, entered the United States. (In fact, 70,000 refugees from all over the world legally came…

Ivan Lesica Queens, New York Lesica started with an old portrait he took of a mannequin. He printed the photo, and then, in his kitchen, he dipped a piece of coral in soapy water and held it in front of the lens to distort the view of the portrait. “I love photography that is unusual, original, and mysterious,” he says. “I fell in love with this image.”…

Vibrant scenes that decorated a mansion more than 2,000 years ago are turning up at a Roman-era site in the southern French city of Arles, astounding the archaeologists who have been working there since 2014. Patches of painted plaster still cling to the masonry walls of a bedroom and reception hall, which are preserved in places to a height of more than three feet. In addition, thousands of fragments that fell off the walls have been recovered from the excavated earth. Reassembled images include figures never before seen in France, such as this woman playing a stringed instrument (right), possibly a character from mythology. The paintings are so masterfully executed, with such expensive pigments, that experts believe the artists originally came from Italy and were hired by one of the…

Perissodactyla, roughly translated, means “odd number of toes.” It’s the order of mammals that includes rhinos (three toes), horses (one hoofed toe), and tapirs (three toes in back and four toes in front). Extra toes are an evolutionary advantage that helps barrel-bodied tapirs with weight bearing and traction. Another adaptive trait that male rhinos, horses, and tapirs share: They’re “extremely well endowed,” says tapir expert Michele Stancer, director of animal care at Utah’s Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City. An aroused tapir’s manhood is so “large and ungainly,” Stancer says, “I actually have seen the male step on it and scream.” Maneuvering the organ into mating position involves many swings and misses. And yet, she says, the male “had to evolve to that size and shape to get where it…

The portraits in this gallery illustrate Europe’s long and complex history of immigration. Algerians came to France while their homeland was a French colony, surging in the 1954-1962 war of independence. Since the 1990s some 40,000 Somalis fleeing civil war have settled in Sweden. Indians are among the three million South Asians who’ve come to Britain from former British colonies. About as many Turks live in Germany. They came as guest workers in the 1960s and ’70s—but stayed and had families. SYRIANS IN GERMANY ALGERIANS IN FRANCE SOMALIS IN SWEDEN INDIANS IN THE U.K. TURKS IN GERMANY In Europe, Germany has taken in the most refugees—and struggled the most with their impact on its culture. If you’re European, and especially if you’re German, you’ve been living for a year now…

In 1929 Prohibition loomed large over local elections around the United States, including at this county courthouse in Barbourville, Kentucky. Republican sheriff candidate B. P. Walker pledged that he was both sober and qualified (see political poster, inset), but his bid was disqualified on corruption charges. Jennie Walker, however, was a different story. B. P.’s wife, a Democrat, would soon become one of Kentucky’s first elected female sheriffs. Though Jennie never carried a gun, daughter Doris Broach said in a 1982 interview that as Knox County sheriff, her mom certainly “arrested people when necessary.” National Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but Barbourville remained dry during Walker’s term and beyond. The town’s change of heart—a vote of 498 to 433 to allow alcohol sales— occurred just this past December.…

After his 33-year run as a late-night television host, David Letterman, 69, wanted to try something new. The comedian now brings his curiosity and humor to the second season of Years of Living Dangerously, a National Geographic Channel series on the impacts of—and solutions to—climate change. For the show he traveled to India, population 1.3 billion, to learn about the world’s energy future. Watch season two of Years of Living Dangerously, beginning October 30 on the National Geographic Channel. You and climate change— what’s the connection? Well, for years I thought I didn’t want to influence people on matters of conscience. I’m not that smart. But then a few years ago someone uttered what has become the cliché in regard to climate change, and that is: What will we tell…

More than 55 million people follow the @natgeo photo feed on Instagram, a collection that offers daily—sometimes hourly—opportunities to be transported and informed. No one person curates the account. The password is shared among a hundred or so National Geographic photographers, who are encouraged to post from wherever they are when they have an image worth sharing. A new book, @NatGeo, presents 255 of the most popular images, as selected by Instagram users and National Geographic’s photo editors. The book @NatGeo is available at shopng.com/natgeobook or wherever books are sold.…

At Lees Ferry, Arizona, the launch point for a raft trip down the basement of the continent, not a disheartening word is heard from those about to start a four-day ride through the Grand Canyon. We’ll see fossil remains from a time when the rock above us was an ocean floor, we’re told. We’ll bounce through rapids shaped by the gravitational tug of the Colorado River at its most muscular. We’ll catch glimpses of bighorn sheep climbing canyon walls and stick our heads under little waterfalls squeezed out of those same walls, rising a mile above the river. At night we’ll sleep on beaches of sugar sand and stare through a sliver of sky at the immensity of the universe. No, sir, not a disheartening word. “Damn! No service.” “What’s…