Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-15 i National Geographic Magazine

Looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa will keep on leaning, stably, awhile longer. More than a dozen years after major foundation work, the imperfect edifice hasn’t increased its lean. In fact, civil engineer John Burland of Imperial College London says his international team has succeeded in straightening the marble bell tower by 19 inches, reducing its angle of incline by about 10 percent, and slowing its once steady creep to nearly nothing. It wasn’t easy. Built from 1173 to 1370 on silt and clay, the eight-story, 182-foot-tall tower resisted many efforts to stabilize it. What finally worked was a soilremoval process called under-excavation and the addition of wells to regulate groundwater. The chief fear now? A big earthquake. “Absent that,” says Burland, “I’d be very surprised indeed if we…

There will never be another Sandy. The thousand-mile-wide 2012 storm, which caused at least $50 billion in damage and 147 deaths, has one of 78 Atlantic hurricane names that have been retired since 1953. Rosters kept by region assign names to storms to help prevent confusion from warnings for simultaneous weather events. Names are reused in later years unless severe damage occurs (as with Sandy, above) or names become controversial—think Adolph, Israel, Isis. Today storm names are drawn from numerous languages and cultures. In the 1970s male names were added to female-only lists. Ascribing gender may have had a surprising effect: A 2014 study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that people take storms with feminine names less seriously, which may put lives at risk. Critics assailed that…

Not so long ago—just a few days, perhaps—the icy water sluicing around my bare legs was snow on a rocky mountaintop in northern Sweden, a hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. Once that snow melted, it joined the Rapa River, which surges through the heart of Laponia, a 3,630-square-mile primordial landscape of mountains, lakes, and boulderstrewn valleys that is both a sublime natural wonder and one of the largest wilderness areas in Europe. Embracing four Swedish national parks (Padjelanta, Stora Sjöfallet, Muddus, and Sarek) and two nature reserves that together were declared a World Heritage site in 1996, Laponia today provides a vast refuge for wildlife and sanctuary for tech-frazzled human beings— the modern European equivalent of a restorative visit to the Pleistocene. Laponia is a diverse heritage site with…

‘You feeling lucky?” Ian McAllister calls. We’re standing on a speck of an island, eight miles west of the British Columbia mainland. Wooded, windswept, it’s one of thousands of islands along this storm-scoured coast, naught but a series of seal-draped rocks between this one and Japan. The April wind whips away my bark of disbelief that luck would come my way, and besides, McAllister—environmental activist, photographer, wolf whisperer—has already made up his mind. He settles into the windrow of bleached driftwood at the high tide line, and so do I. Before us, a gravel tide bar some hundred yards long connects our little island to another. Ensconced in our bony nests, we scan the far island’s twisty green-gold Sitka spruce and cedar, the bladder wrack and eelgrass. And just like…

Honduras Notebook “We believe in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world.” That’s National Geographic’s mission statement, and living it is not without risks. Charging hippos, aggressive sharks, stampeding elephants, even abduction by rebels: Our contributors and explorers have been through it all. Sometimes, though, the biggest problems are caused by the smallest things—which brings us to the plight of some colleagues in this month’s issue. “We didn’t know about the sand flies,” says Doug Preston, who wrote our article on the discovery of a pre-Columbian city in a remote rain forest in eastern Honduras. What Preston, photographer Dave Yoder, and National Geographic grantee Chris Fisher did know, early on, was that the assignment would be challenging. “From the air, it looked like a tropical paradise,”…

Not all work that children do is exploitive. But child labor is generally defined as work that children are too young to do or that harms their health, slows their development, or keeps them from school. In the past decade it has declined by nearly a third, thanks in part to global awareness. More child laborers are in agriculture than in any other sector. Most work on their families’ farms, so it’s not always clear where to draw the line, says the International Labour Organization’s Yoshie Noguchi. Still, she warns, keeping kids in jobs instead of school could yield “an uneducated generation that can’t help its country develop.” CHILD LABOR WORLDWIDE 1/10 OF CHILDREN AGES 5 TO 17 CHILD LABORERS BY REGION Percentage of children who labor No regional data…

Egypt The Giza Pyramids, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, elicit a yawn from a camel named Alex. Built 4,500 years ago, the pharaonic tombs are marvels of architectural ingenuity. The largest comprises 2.3 million stone blocks and stands 481 feet tall. Mexico From a thousand feet above, the arid Colorado River Delta looks like a green-trunked tree with brown branches. As freshwater has dwindled over the past century—due to damming and diversion— wildlife, wetlands, agriculture, and fisheries have too. United States As a big wave breaks off the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, two worlds appear. On the right, a surfer enters the barrel. On the left, submerged photographers track his progress. Heavily touristed, the North Shore is also a proving ground for local surfers. Order prints…

The boat travels under a sky seething with starlight. It thrashes its way through a body of water that sometimes seems oceanic in its vastness and at other times barely more than a shallow creek, which is why it is foolish—and for that matter illegal—to be traveling in the dark. To those on the boat, such considerations—what is prudent, what is lawful—are not entirely insignificant. Ultimately, however, a single rule supersedes all others: Here on the Congo River, one does as one must. The boat is dangerously encumbered. It pushes three barges by means of an engine that was built to convey about 750 tons. The cargo— iron rods, sacks of cement, food products—exceeds 900 tons. Ruffling over the barges is a patchwork roof of tarps and cloth, and beneath…

Space weather could be the next frontier in forecasting. Scientists want to understand how forces in space cause events like geomagnetic storms that can disrupt power grids and GPS systems on Earth. NASA launched its two-year Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) last March to study magnetic reconnection, a key driver of what scientists call space weather, which “starts with a wind, made up of particles streaming from the sun,” says MMS Program Scientist Bill Paterson. Four identical spacecraft are now orbiting Earth, measuring traces of this physical process. Instead of rain and tornadoes, think jets of plasma energized by this magnetic reconnection. Space weather phenomena are generated as magnetic fields connect and disconnect, explosively releasing energy. This kind of disruption can scramble spacecraft computers and make the aurora borealis brighter. But…

On college campuses in the U.S. and around the world, pets are lending a paw to stressed-out students. With many collegians reporting depression, anxiety, and other ills—a 2013 study sponsored by the American College Counseling Association says one in three has used counseling services—school officials arrange “pet therapy” events to spread cheer and fight stress, especially during exams. These aren’t service animals trained to assist people with disabilities; most are the pets of volunteers. Their visits are demonstrably beneficial: Research shows that contact with pets can decrease blood pressure and stress-hormone levels and increase so-called happiness hormones. Mary Margaret Callahan, a director at the nonprofit Pet Partners, considers pet house calls on campus “a great way to support students in being successful.” A JEWISH FAMILY REUNION Of the world’s ten…

A notorious outlaw of the Wild West, Billy the Kid was notoriously camera-shy: Only one authenticated photo of him was believed to exist—until now. Randy Guijarro bought this 4 x 5 tintype (above) at a California memorabilia shop for two dollars in 2010. When he blew it up to 50 inches wide, he saw what looks like a familiar figure (inset) in the posed croquet tableau, dated 1878. Some prominent collectors of Old West photos say that it isn’t Billy, aka William H. Bonney, and his gang of Regulators. But another vintage-photo expert, John McWilliams, says he’s “hovering around 80 percent” that it is. Guijarro has worked with a private investigator to pore over a patch of Lincoln County, New Mexico, that mirrors the photo. TV producers Jeff and Jill…

On September 13, 2013, two recreational cavers named Steven Tucker and Rick Hunter entered a dolomite cave system called Rising Star, some 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg. Rising Star has been a popular draw for cavers since the 1960s, and its filigree of channels and caverns is well mapped. Tucker and Hunter were hoping to find some less trodden passage. In the back of their minds was another mission. In the first half of the 20th century, this region produced so many fossils of our early ancestors that it later became known as the Cradle of Humankind. Though the heyday of fossil hunting there was long past, the cavers knew that a scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg was looking for bones. The odds of happening upon…

On February 18, 2015, a military helicopter lifted off from a shabby airstrip near the town of Catacamas, Honduras, and headed toward the mountains of La Mosquitia on the northeast horizon. Below, farms gradually gave way to steep sunlit slopes, some covered with unbroken rain forest, others partially stripped for cattle ranching. Picking his way through the summits, the pilot headed for a V-shaped notch in a distant ridge. Beyond it lay a valley surrounded by serrated peaks: an unblemished landscape of emerald and gold, dappled with the drifting shadows of clouds. Flocks of egrets flew below, and the treetops thrashed with the movement of unseen monkeys. There were no signs of human life—not a road, a trail, or a wisp of smoke. The pilot banked and descended, aiming for…

With Bill Bonner, National Geographic Archivist “This decorated nook … gives some suggestion of the reckless abandon with which the Cavern is supplied with ornamental furnishings,” say notes accompanying this photo by Willis T. Lee, leader of a six-month-long National Geographic expedition to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns. The woman seen in the loupe appears in several of Lee’s images; she may be his daughter. Lee’s article on this trip ran in our September 1925 issue. All did not go well. Describing how he carried a leaky can of gas on his shoulder (and writing in the third person), he reports that he “noticed a slight dampness in the clothing on his back, but gave it little attention until his flesh began to smart … Not realizing that a gasoline blister…