Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i National Geographic Magazine

WHAT A STRANGE thing it must be to become a fossil. Say you live a full life for a Diplodocus dinosaur, swinging your enormously long tail across your Jurassic world for 70 or so years. Then you die—but in such extraordinary circumstances that, against all odds, your bones are buried and transformed over time into stone. Mountains rise and wear away around you. Rivers come and go. Glaciers rumble overhead. Your bones endure. Even stranger, a hundred or more million years later, volcanic activity comes to dominate the area. When the superheated fluids eventually cool and drain away, your stony bones have become green, highlighted here and there with red patches like roasted meat. And then the strangest turn of all: You return to the surface after an absence of…

1934 Engineer Otis Barton and naturalist William Beebe dive below 3,000 feet, a human first, in a vessel called a bathysphere off the coast of Bermuda. 1960 Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh are the first to visit Challenger Deep, the lowest region of Earth’s oceans. 1970 Scuba gear allows scientists like National Geographic Explorer at Large Sylvia Earle to spend hours underwater. 1977 U.S. scientists discover hydrothermal vents via an underwater camera and temperature sensor. To their surprise, life thrived in this sunless environment. 2012 Filmmaker and Explorer James Cameron exceeds the 1960 depth record at Challenger Deep, which was then surpassed by Victor Vescovo in 2019. 2024 Caltech engineers test the potential of bionic jellyfish—live jellies equipped with sensors to record information as they swim.…

Getting into an OceanX submersible was the kind of moment I had dreamed about since childhood. I grew up shuttling between Puerto Rico, where I was born, and Mexico, where I moved when I was two years old, always exploring the tide pools and beaches of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. When I joined the OceanX crew, I finally had the chance to go really deep, heading for an undersea shelf on the edge of a seamount. For me, this journey was more than just a scientific expedition. It was a statement—a declaration of my presence in a world where people like me, people of color, were often overlooked and underestimated. I’ve made the sea my life. Mostly, I focus on sharks: their ecology, behavior, and conservation.…

OCEAN “After observing the animal’s behavior, I positioned myself and CAPTURED THE CLOWNFISH in a moment of what appeared to be a kissing or whispering gesture.” DENNIS CORPUZ, Photographer WILDLIFE “The purple color attracted my attention, and when I kneeled to take a photo, I found the supertiny white fungi standing next to them and making them LOOK LIKE GIANTS in comparison.” JAVIER AZNAR, Photographer TRAVEL “Usually 500 to 1,000 people travel in each launch, but during ANY VACATION, the number doubles or triples. People take positions on the top deck and make an hours-long journey.” MOSTAFIJUR RAHMAN NASIM, Photographer CULTURE “It was magical to capture the UNEXPECTED, a moment of balance and delicate rest in the Dionysian frenzy of the traditional celebrations of the Vesuvian countryside.” ELENI ALBAROSA, Photographer…

BEFORE THEY TRANSFORM into moths and butterflies, caterpillars must outwit, outplay, outlast. Sam Jaffe’s images of the tubular creatures show just how: through mimicry, defensive adaptations, and partnerships with plants. The naturalist-photographer has been enamored with the insects since age four. “I used to bring them into my parents’ house,” he says. “They’d find them crawling up the walls.” While working at Harvard University, Jaffe began taking pictures of native caterpillars during his free time, then displaying the results at local galleries. The exhibitions sparked so much interest that he launched an educational nonprofit, the Caterpillar Lab, in 2013, to open our eyes to these masters of metamorphosis and inspire their protection.…

A mother bear and her cub amble toward us across the grassland. The cub—a shaggier, blonder miniature of the mother—is in its second summer here in Hallo Bay on the coast of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. It mirrors mom’s adult behavior but is still playful, affectionate. Now the cub snuggles against her, and they sit down facing away from us and curl up for a nap. They’re completely, almost radically, at peace with our presence. And the feeling is mutual. Within half an hour, my fiancé—who, like many first-time visitors to Katmai, had been concerned about coming close to such large predators—is so at ease around the bears that he too falls asleep in the grass. Around 2,200 brown bears live in Katmai National Park and Preserve’s four million acres, and…

FOR GOING ON THREE YEARS NOW, I’VE BEEN WALKING ACROSS CHINA. WHEN DONE, I’LL HAVE LOGGED SOME 4,200 MILES. STARTING IN THE SOUTHWEST in October 2021 and rambling northeast, I’ve roughly followed an imaginary geographical divide called the Hu Line, which separates China’s lusher, densely populated east from its more arid and roomier west. I haven’t spotted too many motorized Chinese out stomping my trails. In a nation of 1.4 billion, this felt odd sometimes, to claim horizons for myself. Which isn’t to say I’m not meeting ghosts. When you walk the world—and I’ve been trekking from Africa to South America for almost a dozen straight years, following the pathways blazed by our prehistoric ancestors out of Africa—you begin to read terrain like a palimpsest. Some places barely offer up…

ON A WARM JUNE MORNING, A 286-FOOT private research vessel set off from the green and rocky sea cliffs of the Azores, a chain of islands jutting upward from the North Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles west of mainland Portugal. The gleaming white Ocean Xplorer, rising high above the water, resembled a modified superyacht, with a helicopter pad on the bow and a of yellow submersibles near the stern. Below the surface, the ship’s hull featured a high-resolution sonar array to map underwater terrain. The OceanXplorer had embarked on a unique mission: to tag and retrieve data from bluntnose sixgill sharks in their natural environment, an area so deep that much of their behavior remains a mystery. These prehistoric predators, whose ancestors first appeared 200 million years ago, can grow…

SOURCES: NOAA; OCEANX SUBMERSIBLES OceanXplorer carries a fleet of three small vessels that can operate at depths as far as 19,685 feet, opening up almost 98 percent of the world’s seafloor for exploration. DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE WONDERS OF THE DEEP SEA. OCEANXPLORERS, A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SERIES, BEGINS STREAMING ON DISNEY+ AUGUST 19.…

The deep sea—defined as the area between where light begins to dwindle and the seafloor—makes up nearly all of the ocean. But because of extreme pressure, frigid temperatures, and lack of sunlight, it remains the least explored. Much of modern ocean research is focused on mapping its geographic features and cataloging its eclectic collection of life. For the past 15 years, scientists working with the Schmidt Ocean Institute have explored its depths with urgency. In 2024 alone, SOI expeditions discovered around 150 species believed to be new to science, including deep-sea corals and squat lobsters. Their fastidious exploration stands to not only demystify the deep sea but also improve the way we manage and conserve it.…

UNTIL RECENTLY, scientists thought South America was home to just one kind of green anaconda, the world’s heaviest snake. But a study has revealed there are two species of the reptile: Eunectes murinus, the southern green anaconda that lives in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia, and the newly named Eunectes akayima, or northern green anaconda. The latter is found in Ecuador, Venezuela, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and Colombia. Nearly identical in appearance but with distinct genetics, both snakes also dwell in French Guiana, sometimes on opposite banks of the same river. Yet they never interbreed. According to study co-author Bryan Fry, a National Geographic Explorer and biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, they’re more than 5 percent different genetically. To put that into context, we’re less than 3 percent different from…

FROM OUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS PHOTOGRAPHER Chris Burkard LIKES 12,430+ WHERE Hampi, India HUMAN-POWERED, slow travel—that’s what photographer Chris Burkard treasures. For this shot, he crawled up a ledge, mindful of snakes, to capture his friend bouldering. With padding below him in case of a fall, the friend is just a dot in the surrounding grandeur. The World Heritage site and onetime capital of the Vijayanagara Empire is a popular area for outdoor adventure. Burkard loved being able to show his subject as a detail in the landscape, “almost like a period at the end of a sentence.” Join our more than 382 million Instagram followers here: @natgeo, @natgeotravel, @natgeointhefield, @natgeoadventure, @natgeoyourshot, @natgeotv, @natgeowild, @natgeodocs. SOCIETY With interactive online maps, the 2892 Miles to Go education program, supported by the National…