Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i National Geographic Magazine

WE PUBLISHED the first issue of National Geographic in October 1888. The magazine looked quite different from today’s, with a plain brown cover and not a single photograph in its 98 pages. Clearly, a lot has changed. But two things have remained constant: We have always covered science, and we’ve always covered the environment. “Geographic Methods in Geologic Investigation” is one headline from that first issue. “The Great Storm of March 11-14, 1888” is another. Today we’re still covering storms, especially as they grow fiercer with climate change. And we’re still covering groundbreaking science—perhaps now more than ever, as we document the coronavirus that has swept across the Earth since the start of the year. In this issue of National Geographic, along with our exclusive coverage of Mount Everest, there’s…

“YOU HAVE COME FROM MUMBAI to teach us about handwashing?” The villagers couldn’t stop laughing at Yusuf Kabir. He works at UNICEF’s Mumbai office, in a division with an apt acronym—WASH, for water, sanitation, and hygiene—and he was on a tour of the Latur district, some 250 miles east of Mumbai, to advocate hand hygiene as a safeguard of health. In Latur, as elsewhere in the state of Maharashtra, Kabir was learning that handwashing just wasn’t a priority for many villagers. “They couldn’t see any tangible impact,” he recalls. That was long before the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 24, the same day Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered India’s more than 1.3 billion citizens to stay inside their homes for at least three weeks—a period he later extended—researchers at the University…

LADAKH, A HIGH PLATEAU at the northern tip of India, beyond the Himalaya, is under attack. The enemy is cutting off its water sources, drying its farmlands. Desperate farmers, who long raised pashmina goats, wheat, and barley on the arid land, are fleeing to Leh, a city on the Indus River. Sonam Wangchuk and I are driving over passes and valleys above 9,000 feet to inspect his defenses: tall cones of ice that he calls stupas. “This enemy wears no uniform, bears no allegiance to any nation-state, and carries no automatic weapons,” says Wangchuk, an engineer who also founded an alternative school in Ladakh. “Undeterred by borders, it bides by no international laws. We Ladakhis are on the front lines of a very different war.” The enemy is climate change.…

THREE MOUNTAINEERS CONFERRED on the Southeast Ridge of Mount Everest as dawn broke over the Tibetan Plateau. More than a mile below, the sun’s rays illuminated a band of clouds that was feathering the flanks of the mountain with snow. The men, wearing thick down suits, oxygen masks, and headlamps, hardly noticed the view. They were on a short clock, limited by the amount of oxygen they carried and the possibility that the notoriously fickle weather could suddenly turn against them. Already they’d been delayed by crowds of climbers who’d stormed up the Nepali side of the mountain, hoping to summit that day in late May 2019. But the men couldn’t worry about that now. They about their work with the exaggerated deliberateness of astronauts, methodically unpacking tools and instruments…

LOOKING AT THE CRISIS FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE IN THIS SECTION Warnings We Ignored The Cost of Distancing A View From Nairobi Water for Handwashing…

THE NOM ENCLATURE WAS so strange at first, and then it was everywhere: in our stories, our questions, our arguments, our dreams. In California, where I live, I wake with a racing heart one morning because in the nightmare I was trying to buy cloth, for a mask, but the other shoppers wouldn’t distance. How do they say it where you are? I type online to friends in other places, and the responses pile on. Distanciamento social, Brazil. Distanciation sociale, France. To meters avstand, Norway—two meters distance. From Mexico City comes a picture of the new cartoon superhero, Susana Distancia, grinning from a sort of isolation bubble inside of which she holds both arms straight out to the sides, marking the no-approach zone. A Delhi friend passes on a comic’s…

“DON’T DO IT,” he said. “You’re too tired. It’s not worth it.” Jamie McGuinness, our guide and expedition leader, looked hard at me with sunken, blood-shot eyes. He had slipped off his oxygen mask and removed his sunglasses. Several days of gray stubble covered his chin. His skin had a sallow, corpselike pallor. We were sitting on a pile of rocks at 27,700 feet on the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest—the Chinese side, away from the crowd in Nepal. A couple hundred feet below us was the GPS way-point that could solve one of the greatest mysteries of mountaineering. New research indicated that legendary British explorer Andrew “Sandy” Irvine may have tumbled and come to rest at that spot. Was his body still there? Almost a century ago, while descending this ridge,…

FROM NEAR MOUNT KANGRINBOQE in Tibetrise four major rivers, which stretch east and west across the Himalaya and down to the sea like the limbs of a venerable water goddess. Where these rivers flow, they define civilizations and nations: Tibet, Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, Bangladesh. How their water is spent has long depended on the people living downstream. How the rivers are replenished depends on two things: monsoon rains and glacial ice melt. Both phenomena, for millennia the preserve of the gods, are now in the hands of humans too. Rivers emerging from the eastern Himalaya, like the Brahmaputra, are mostly fed by the summer monsoon; their flow may well increase as a warming climate puts more moisture in the atmosphere. But most water in the Indus, which flows west…

THE OLD SNOW LEOPARD was well-known in Kibber. It was unclear when he’d claimed the gorges and cliffs around this ancient Himalayan village, but over the past few years, the people here had come to recognize this large male, with a notched left ear, and kept track of him to the extent anyone could. Like all snow leopards, he was part phantom and would shape-shift, dissolving into these mountains like smoke from the village chimneys, dispersing into the cold, thin air. The old ones are the ones you must watch. When snow leopards are too old to hunt the ibex and blue sheep that live among the limestone crags, they seek easier prey, the village’s goats and sheep, young horses, and yak calves. On a bitterly cold afternoon in February,…

WHO Vitale makes photographs that tell stories about the beauty and interconnectedness of life on Earth. WHERE Near Sulina, Romania, where the Danube River flows into the Black Sea WHAT A Nikon D4S camera with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens As winners of the Inge Morath Award, which honors young women photographers, Vitale and seven others got to spend five weeks following the path of Austrian-American photographer Morath, who captured life along the Danube River. The group converted a truck into a gallery space to display her work. They also took new images to show contemporary life in the places that Morath had photographed in the 20th century. Near Sulina, Romania, Vitale watched this fisherman in a quiet moment. This page showcases images from National Geographic’s Instagram accounts. We’re the most…

WHEN THE WORLD seems unkind, “home is the place where … they have to take you in,” wrote the poet Robert Frost. But in the era of a deadly virus that requires self-isolation for weeks on end, homes have become much more than sources of comfort and familiarity. We’ve turned them into schools and offices, centers of entertainment, and hot spots of tension. If boredom, stress, and anxiety could be harnessed for energy, they’d power the planet. Photographers around the globe have captured images of this strange time, when we’re separated from each other by walls and windows. Seen together, the photos make us wonder, what even is a home? In a world plagued by COVID-19, the answer has increasingly become a measure of privilege. Do you have a home?…

FOR MOST PEOPLE in Kenya, life finds a way to go on despite COVID-19. But defending against the deadly virus is especially challenging in one of the world’s most unequal countries: Almost 37 percent of the 53 million people there live on $1.90 or less a day. And self-quarantining can go only so far in a place where many rely on informal markets for food, medicine, AFRICA and employment. Nairobi Since mid-March, when KENYA the coronavirus came to Kenya, I’ve watched the virus spread through Nairobi, where I’ve lived for eight years. I’ve followed paramedics and visited the homes of people scared of the virus and its economic havoc. A month after its first case, Kenya had confirmed fewer than 200 cases, and just eight deaths. “But even these small…

Some 270 million people in four countries depend on the Indus River and its tributaries. But population growth, mismanagement, and climate change all threaten this crucial water supply. North is at the bottom left of this map, which follows the Indus from its source in Tibet (top left) to the Arabian Sea (right). WORRYING WATER USE About 60 percent of water from the Indus and its tributaries is withdrawn for human use; a third of that evaporates from irrigation canals and flooded fields. Flow is also taken up by natural ecosystems as the river winds through semiarid plains.…

These agile, high-altitude cats have been scraping out a living on the roof of the world for eons—and they have the body to show for it. Snow leopards balance their need for speed and power in pursuit of prey with adaptations to help them cope with steep terrain, low oxygen, and bitter cold.…