Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i National Geographic Magazine

LONGTIME READERS of this page will know that Pictures of the Year—our annual selection of the most compelling images captured by National Geographic photographers—is one of my favorite things we publish. Of course, we believe deeply in the power of photography here, and that means we put a lot of effort into the work. And that means the collection of shots in this feature is always stunning. What I most look forward to each year, after our team has gone through thousands of images, winnowing them down through many rounds of editing over several months, is the moment I get to sit with the results, looking at the photos one by one, reading the captions, and pondering what they add up to. They reveal something, I think—something that the world…

Mbaye Awa, Senegal IN THE ARID PLAINS of western Senegal, Africa’s ambitious Great Green Wall project is well under way. In 2007, African Union leaders conceived a bold initiative to fight desertification by planting one massive line of vegetation before 2030 that would stretch nearly 5,000 miles across more than 20 countries. If successful, the multibillion-dollar restoration will be one of the largest steps ever taken to bring back degraded land. Whether or not that grand goal is met, local farmers are making progress tending to the “wall.” Marieme Samba Ba, seen here in the foreground, is treasurer of And Book Am Am (Together We Share Wealth), an all-female Senegalese food cooperative in Mbaye Awa. Nine years ago, And Book Am Am was granted a 15-acre plot by the government,…

Kiruna, Sweden FOR THE SAMI people, reindeer herding is a deeply held tradition passed down through generations. Said to be the only Indigenous group in Europe, and with a population of around 100,000, they live off the land in a territory stretching across parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The Sami are fierce guards of their ancient heritage, repeatedly pushing back against new developments that interfere with reindeer migration routes. Today there’s a proliferation of projects to extract metals such as lithium and nickel that power sustainable technologies in Europe. From the outside, more green initiatives seem like a step in the right direction. But the issue with many of these developments, especially the ones in northern Sweden, is that they rip through the protected regions of the…

WHEN LAVANIA OLUBAN looks at photos from her childhood, the memories feel incomplete. “It’s hazy around the edges—I’m filling in missing pieces of the puzzle with a memory that’s not quite real,” she says. Oluban, a 38-year-old living in Birmingham, England, has only a handful of birthday photos from when she was young. But her eight-year-old-son, Arlo, has “easily 200,” captured by different attendees on their smartphones. “Practically every single second of his life is documented,” she says. “Arlo’s almost got a virtual reality representation of an event because there are so many pictures and videos. I think for him, it’s quite vivid.” It’s impossible to say just how many smartphone photos are taken worldwide in a year, but at least one market research firm predicts the number will approach two…

The eyes have it Memories influenced by multiple senses (say, seeing and smelling an apple pie as it comes out of Grandma’s oven) have a higher chance of being remembered because they form what’s known as a memory engram—a physical imprint in the brain across different sensory areas. But of all the senses, visual longterm memory takes up the most real estate in the brain. “You can recognize a smell, but it’s hard to recall a smell,” says Jonathan Schooler, a cognitive psychologist and professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s easy to conjure an image in your mind.” Write it down: Visual memory isn’t just limited to, well, visuals; it can effectively convert images to information. Write out a to-do list, and…

WE TEND TO THINK of human memory as one of those old steel filing cabinets: Information gets stashed inside, and when the time comes, we hope we can find it by flipping through the tabs on a few billion neuronsupported manila folders. But the truth, as science has learned (and continues to learn), is that memory is as critical to how we imagine the future as it is to how we interpret our past. And few have done more work to unlock this powerful reframing of human memory than cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter. He and his team at Harvard’s Schacter Memory Lab have spent years teasing out just how those systems overlap. Their work suggests that memories are being accessed, consciously and unconsciously, while we do everything from solving problems…

BOOKS IT WAS A big task to curate images for inclusion in the new milestone anthology The Photographs: Iconic Images from National Geographic. The process began with thousands of candidates drawn from Nat Geo’s enormous archive, says Adrian Coakley, the director of photography at National Geographic Books, who coedited the anthology along with photo editor Katie Dance. With so many standout photos telling so many different types of stories, Coakley says one of the most important questions asked of each image was also one of the simplest: “Does it make me stop and take notice?” The arresting pictures that made the cut represent more than a century of photos taken in every corner of the globe. They’re interspersed with reflections from acclaimed photographers on the power of a memorable image to…

Last year, researchers published evidence of the role a large maritime project had in creating the pyramids. The findings build on previous studies and information gleaned from the Red Sea Scrolls, discovered in 2013 by French Egyptologist Pierre Tallet. Among them was the 4,600-year-old diary of an inspector named Merer that explained how he and his team transported massive stone blocks along the Nile when river levels swelled with rainwater from upstream in the Ethiopian Highlands.…

Arctic Ocean, north of Svalbard, Norway ASPERM WHALE FLOATS amid shards of polar pack ice, dead and decomposing, mouth hanging open. When photographer Roie Galitz captured the scene with a drone, the image was so arresting that it took a moment to notice the hungry female polar bear stretching her jaw to break through the whale’s leathery skin. Galitz was leading a photography expedition along Norway’s Svalbard archipelago when he spotted a blackened blob floating on the horizon. As the icebreaker drew close, he could see (and smell) that the blob was a massive decaying carcass releasing an occasional exhalation of noxious gas, “like a big air cushion.” The encounter raised a curious question: What was a sperm whale doing here? The species prefers temperate climes, but as Arctic waters…

David Quammen, p.114 An Explorer since 2019 and a longtime National Geographic contributor, Quammen twice profiled Jane Goodall for the magazine, including in a 2003 story for which he trekked with her to a field camp deep within the Congolese tropical forest. In this issue he reflects on the late primatologist’s legacy. Lois Parshley, p.94 Before covering AI’s take on what’s memorable for this month’s feature on memory science, Parshley’s last piece for the magazine was a dispatch from a women-led Arctic research outpost. Her stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the New York Times. Luján Agusti, p.90 While accompanying Explorer and ecologist Jane Younger on an expedition to document avian flu in Antarctica, the Argentine photographer helped spot a seabird that Younger’s team was hoping…

Merer’s aquatic journey may sound impossible. Today the land surrounding the pyramids is awash in desert sand. But in 2023, a team led by geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim from the University of North Carolina Wilmington found evidence of a lost branch of the Nile, lying closer to the pyramids. They named it the Ahramat (Arabic for “pyramids”), though some scholars call it the western branch of the Nile. Using geophysical surveys, radar satellite imagery, and deep soil coring, the team found that the branch’s course closely tracked along the building sites of the pyramids, showing how the Ahramat’s presence might have been a critical factor in determining where Egypt’s most famous monuments were constructed.…

Botswana and Canada OVER THE COURSE of one action-packed day, photographer Stephen Wilkes watched animals charge toward a meager water hole at the height of extreme drought in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Elephants flared their ears. The legs of antelope and zebras splayed in a mad dash. One hippo dipped its head to charge an elephant calf, while another opened its mighty mouth in an intimidating display. Wilkes applied his signature Day to Night technique, in which he takes as many as 1,500 pictures from one vantage point over the course of 18 to 36 hours, seamlessly layering the 50 or so best moments to create a final image. The animals “were all thirsty, hot, and stressed,” Wilkes says. “Everybody was for themselves.” Ten years ago, perched on a similar water…

Primal, critical, slightly glitchy: Memory is one of the mind’s great enigmas. Why do we remember what we remember—and forget what we try so hard to retain? Can we get our memory to work … better? And what did I just walk into this room for? For answers, we turned to researchers working at the frontiers of memory science. In the following pages, we discover how technology might be shortcircuiting your capacity to remember, new ways to test your memory (and recognize your blind spots), and the sciencebacked secrets that unlock your brain’s full potential. Turns out, as murky as memory can be, there’s plenty we can do to make ours sharper, for longer.…

HUMANS ONCE STOOD on a pedestal: made by God in his image, earthly lords of all creation, categorically distinct from mere animals. That was the belief, anyway. Jane Goodall played a large role in eroding that self-flattering conviction, with her extraordinary study of wild chimpanzees at what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania. By discovering unexpected behavioral similarities between chimps and humans, she continued the revolution begun by Copernicus and Galileo and advanced in a great leap by Charles Darwin: taking Earth out of the center of the universe and humans down from our holy isolation. Goodall helped us see, long before genome comparisons confirmed it, that the gap between chimps and people is smaller than anyone thought. Gorillas aren’t the closest living relatives of chimpanzees. We are. She…