09.

2023

INSIDE THE

DOME
OF
THE
ROCK
A N E X C L U S I V E L O O K AT
O N E O F T H E WO R L D ’ S MO ST
SAC R E D S I T E S
 N O C E L L S E RV I C E
IN THE WILD

But there is lots of roaming. Elephants need lots of space to live. That’s why when you join us on
our conservation trip in Kenya, you’re helping support the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s elephant
habitat protection program. In fact, no matter where you travel with us, a portion of that fare
always goes back to supporting important causes around the world from research,
to conservation, and more.

N ATG E O E X P E D I T I O N S .C O M | 1 - 8 8 8 -3 51 -3 274
 FURTHER SEPTEMBER 2023

C O N T E N T S On the Cover
Visitors pause in the
Jerusalem compound
surrounding the Dome of
the Rock, in a February
2022 photograph.
ZIYAH GAFIĆ

P R O O F E X P L O R E

THE BIG IDEA

When Pasta
Is Prologue
Scientists’ hunt for a
low-cost way to cook
pasta yielded theories,
data, recipes, and puns.
BY DAV I D FA I R H U R ST

THROUGH THE LENS

Chasing Elusive
Animal Images
32
ARTIFACT

Shoes That Hit the

Urban wildlife may be Height of Fashion
getting easier to spot— In Renaissance Venice,
but not to photograph. noblewomen tottered
BY C O R E Y A R N O L D
on towering shoes
ALSO
called chopines.
BY C AT H Y N E W M A N
Cutting Tumors’ Oxygen
Rwanda’s Akagera Park INNOVATOR

Angelo Bernardino
A Call to Remember He studies mangrove
“Peace is our number ecosystems, as part of
one priority,” wrote an Amazon expedition
Sachiko Matsuo (above), supported by National
one of the survivors of Geographic and Rolex.
atom bombs the U.S. BY N ATA S H A DA LY
dropped on Hiroshima
ALSO
and Nagasaki in 1945.
P H OTO G R A P H S BY Counting Stellar Rings
H A RU K A S A K AG U C H I Tennis Ball Recycling

PHOTO: ROLAND PARGETER, ALAMY (GIRAFFES)

S E P T E M B E R | CONTENTS
F E AT U R E S Under the Dome
It’s the third holiest site
in Islam and an archi-
tectural gem—one
place among several
on Jerusalem’s acropo-
lis that are revered and
contested. After nearly
1,400 years, the Dome
of the Rock remains a
revelation to scholars,
and a flash point for
Israelis and Palestinians.
B Y A N D R E W L AW L E R
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
Z I YA H G A F I Ć
......................................
Ghost Forests An Exceptional
Known for their resil- Wilderness
iency, cypress trees The largest protected
face a growing threat. area in Mozambique
BY JOEL K . BOURNE , JR. includes local residents
P H OTO G RA P H S BY in conservation.
M AC STO N E BY L E O N I E J O U B E RT
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P. 62 P H OTO G RA P H S BY
THOMAS PESCHAK
The Sound of Ice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P. 108
In Chile, glaciers tell
tales of warning—if In the western
A B OV E :
visitors are listening. Everglades, an endangered
BY RO B E RT D R A P E R Florida panther prowls a
P H OTO G RA P H S BY cypress slough—home to
TA M A R A M E R I N O trees that also are becom-
P. 34 ...................................... P. 86 ing a vanishing species.
S E P T E M B E R | FROM THE EDITOR
B Y N AT H A N LU M P
I joined National Geo-
S H O RT LY B E F O R E
graphic last year, I traveled to one of
my favorite places on the planet: Chile.
During several visits over the years,
I’ve fallen in love with its people and
culture and with its landscapes, from
the high desert of the north to the fjords
and rugged mountains of the south.
On this visit, my husband, Charles,
and I returned to Patagonia, specifically
to Patagonia National Park, created
through the efforts of visionary Amer-
ican conservationists Kris and Doug
Tompkins. (Their work in South Amer-
ica is the subject of a terrific National
Geographic documentary, Wild Life,
which you can watch on Disney+.)
I’ve long considered this one of the
great by-products of travel: While you’re
having a good time, you’re also exposed
to things that really make you think.
As we hiked through the park, I found
myself reflecting on the challenges
such majestic spaces face—human
exploitation of land, rewilding, sus-
tainable preservation. Charles and I
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIMMY CHIN
didn’t make it to the nearby glaciers These mountains are part
while we were in Patagonia, but in this of Corcovado National
Park, one of the 10 parks
issue, writer Robert Draper and photog- either created or expanded
rapher Tamara Merino take us there. over the past three
Chile’s glaciers, among the world’s decades in Chile thanks
to American conserva-
most impressive, are retreating at an tionists Kris and Doug
alarming rate. To visit them is to expe- Tompkins. Doug perished
rience a wonder and to encounter the in a kayaking accident in
December 2015; Kris contin-
visible effects of climate change. Travel ues the couple’s work.
has its own complicated relationship
with sustainability, but it’s also an
important way to better understand
the world—and that’s why travel has
a prominent place in our storytelling.
Our coverage this month also in-
cludes an extraordinary look at the
Dome of the Rock. For the cover story,
National Geographic was granted
unprecedented access to this most
revered—and contested—site. Pho-
tographer Ziyah Gafić’s images reveal
the place as few may ever have seen it.
We hope you enjoy the issue.
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S E P T E M B E R | CONTRIBUTORS

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C E X P L O R E R S
These contributors have received funding from
the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating
and protecting the wonder of our world.

Thomas Peschak
Educated as a marine biologist, Peschak picked up a camera in an effort to increase his influence on wildlife
conservation. His images of oceans, coasts, and islands have filled eight books and garnered 17 Wildlife Photographer
of the Year awards. An Explorer since 2017, he’s participating in the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet
Amazon Expedition, for which he photographed the magazine’s July 2023 article on Amazonian rock art. While
shooting this month’s feature in Mozambique, he documented the relationship between people and wildlife, from a
honey hunter raiding a beehive up a baobab tree to pilgrims revering baboons at a sacred ceremonial site. Page 108

Haruka Sakaguchi Corey Arnold Mac Stone Tamara Merino

Born in Osaka, Japan, and
now living in New York,
Sakaguchi became an
Explorer in 2022. Her pho-
tography on cultural iden-
tity and intergenerational
trauma has been featured
in publications such as Time
and exhibited at the Nobel
Peace Center in Oslo. Page 8
A photographer focusing
on humans’ relationships
with nature, Arnold has
been an Explorer since
2019. His feature story on
urban wildlife ran in the
July 2022 issue of National
Geographic. He also cap-
tains a commercial fishing
boat in Alaska. Page 27
Childhood wanderings
through the swamps near
his Florida home inspired
Stone’s mission to use
photography as a way to
encourage appreciation
of America’s wetlands. An
Explorer since 2018, Stone
has released a book of his
Everglades images. Page 62
Based in Chile, Merino
trains her lens on topics
related to human rights,
with a specialty in people
who live underground. Her
work has appeared in the
New York Times and Wash-
ington Post, among others,
and she’s been an Explorer
since 2020. Page 86

PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP): DANIEL ZIEGERT; TAMARA MERINO; ZACH STEINHAUSER; COREY ARNOLD; RODRIGO CHODIL
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 P R O O F

P H OTO G RA P H S BY HARUKA SAKAGUCHI

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C LO O K I N G AT T H E E A RT H F RO M E V E RY P O S S I B L E A N G L E

Minoru Moriuchi (8 0* )
N AGA S A K I • 3 M I L E S F RO M
H Y P O C E N T E R AT T I M E O F B O M B I N G
“On the morning of August 9, 1945, I
was perched atop a giant persimmon tree
in our backyard, catching cicadas,” says
Moriuchi. Then “the sun exploded.”

OPPOSITE
Kumiko Arakawa (92)
N AGA S A K I • 1.8 MILES
Arakawa, who died in 2019, lost both par-
ents and four siblings in the bombing. “At
age 20, I was suddenly required to support
my surviving family members,” she said.

*The ages are as of 2017, the year the

portraits were taken.

8 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 A CALL TO REMEMBER
This photographer’s project honors those whose lives were forever changed by the atomic bomb.
VO L . 2 4 4 N O. 3

SEPTEMBER 2023 9
P R O O F

Sachiko Matsuo (8 3)
N AGA S A K I • 0. 8 M I L E

10 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 When the U.S. dropped atomic
bombs over Japan in August
1945, people were blown apart,
burned, and crushed.
Debris and ash descended as radioactive fallout, called black rain. The
extreme heat of the explosions ignited massive fires that caused people to
flee to rivers, where many drowned. By the end of the year, the death toll
from Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled more than 200,000. But it didn’t stop
there. Many who initially survived would later succumb to radiation-induced
illnesses; sometimes their children, too, suffered from related ailments.
Hibakusha is the Japanese term for “atomic bomb survivors”—but given
the lasting damages of radiation exposure, it’s perhaps more accurately
translated as “atomic bomb sufferers.”
At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, my mother was six years old and
at home, a mile away from the hypocenter (the ground directly below the
explosion)—or so I thought. She never told me about her experience, and I
never asked about it, as the thought of facing her vulnerability scared me.
I witnessed my mother’s suffering throughout her life—from Ménière’s
disease in her 30s, “blood booster” shots in her 40s, and multiple cancers
in her 50s. She died at age 62. My aunt later told me that my mother might
have been even closer to the hypocenter, at an elementary school where
hundreds of children perished.
My grandfather died from acute radiation sickness. My grandmother
“Peace is our number one died from lung cancer. My cousin, whose mother was in Hiroshima that
priority,” says Matsuo in day, developed an autoimmune disease that took her life when she was in
Japanese, above. As part
her 50s. I was grateful to reach 50. I never thought I would survive that long.
of her project, photog-
rapher Sakaguchi asked Knowing the horrors of atomic bombs, many hibakusha advocate for
bomb survivors, or peace. Their vision became partially realized on January 22, 2021, when
hibakusha, to write down the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was put
a message for future gen-
erations. For translations into effect, but neither the U.S. nor Japan has ratified it.
of all the messages I tell the stories of hibakusha in the university courses I teach and on edu-
shown here, complete cational tours to Japan that I lead. Photographer Haruka Sakaguchi traveled
testimonies, and details
about the experiences there in 2017 to seek out hibakusha willing to share their experiences, which
of other hibakusha, visit she preserves in her documentary project 1945. A National Geographic
1945project.com. Explorer, Sakaguchi pays tribute to this ever shrinking community through
portraits, testimonies, and messages to future generations. I’m grateful for
her work, which serves our shared goal: to ensure that this atrocity and the
ongoing plight of these people aren’t forgotten. —Y U K I M I YA M OTO

SEPTEMBER 2023 11
P R O O F

Ryouga Suwa (84 )

H I R O S H I M A • NYUSHI HIBAKUSHA
Suwa’s parents died at his father’s Buddhist tem-
ple, and his 16-year-old sister never returned home.
Suwa was a genbaku koji, an atomic bomb orphan,
and a nyushi hibakusha, meaning he was exposed
to radiation close to the hypocenter after the
explosion. Before his death, in 2019, Suwa wrote
(above, in part): “It would be ideal if we could all
cultivate in us the ability to dignify each other
instead of getting upset over our differences.”

Hideki, right, and Kiharu Kuroita ( 3 7 & 5 )

N A G A S A K I | 3 R D & 4 T H G E N E R AT I O N S
In his message to future generations, shown
above, Hideki wrote, “I am a third-generation
hibakusha; however, I have not been very cog-
nizant of this throughout my life. Still, there
are visible scars all over Nagasaki from the time
of the bombing, such as charred walls. I hope that
visitors to Nagasaki will pass on the stories of
terror involving the atomic bomb.” His daughter,
Kiharu, signed her name at the bottom.

12 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Keiko Okinishi (5 2 )
H I R O S H I M A | 2 N D G E N E R AT I O N
Okinishi is a second-generation hibakusha; her
mother survived the Nagasaki bomb, and Okini-
shi has a thyroid disease, which a doctor said was
likely caused by her mother’s radiation exposure.
“I have felt compelled to learn more about the
atomic bomb and my mother’s history,” Okinishi
wrote (above, in part). And she is now a densho-
sha, or legacy successor, sharing her experiences
as a hibakusha with others.

Akito Kawamoto (9 0 )
H I R O S H I M A • NYUSHI HIBAKUSHA
When the bomb exploded, Kawamoto escaped
direct exposure, because he was riding a train
on his way home to Hiroshima from the island of
Kyushu. He spent days searching for his wife in
the wreckage of the city. She survived the attack
but was later diagnosed with genbakushoo, or
radiation-induced illness. As Kawamoto witnessed
his wife’s suffering, “her pain quickly became my
pain,” he says in his online testimony.

SEPTEMBER 2023 13
P R O O F

Fujio Torikoshi (86)

H I RO S H I M A • 1. 2 M I L E S

Just 14 when the bomb hit, Torikoshi was in front of his house looking for the planes whose engines he had heard. All he
saw was a black dot. Then it burst into “a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings,” he said in his testimony. He felt
intense heat on his face, was swept off his feet, and passed out. When he regained consciousness, he tried to stop the

14 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
burning sensation by submerging himself in water, which only made it worse. His injuries were so severe he wasn’t expected
to survive past 20. Yet he lived many more decades, passing away in 2018. “Life is a curious treasure,” he wrote (above). “We
cannot continue to sacrifice precious lives to warfare,” he said. “All I can do is pray—earnestly, relentlessly—for world peace.”

SEPTEMBER 2023 15
 Scan to Donate

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 IN THIS SECTION

Manta Ray Mom Scans

E X P L O R E Reclaiming Tennis Balls

Urban Wildlife Scenes
The Height of Footwear

I L L U M I N AT I N G T H E M Y S T E R I E S — A N D W O N D E R S — A L L A R O U N D U S E V E R Y D AY

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C VO L . 2 4 4 N O. 3

Science, Boiled
Down to Pasta
PUT TING PHYSICS TO WORK IN REAL LIFE CAN MAKE THE SCIENCE LESS
I N T I M I D AT I N G , M O R E D I G E S T I B L E — P E R H A P S E V E N I N S P I R I N G .

B Y DAV I D FA I R H U R S T

Find the most frugal

O U R TA S K WA S S I M P L E E N O U G H :
way to cook pasta, and explain the science behind it.
But there was the Nobel laureate’s plan to con-
sider, as well as the opinions of Michelin-starred
chefs. There were only a few elements—pot, water,
pasta—but many ways to vary them, along with heat
and time. There were ecological considerations,
cost breakdowns—and, constantly, puns boiling
over. All part of demonstrating science’s real-world
applications.
As often happens with scientific investigations,
the inspiration came from something else entirely: a
hummingbird hawk-moth using its slender proboscis
to feed. As a physicist with a particular interest in all
things soft or fluidlike, I was intrigued: How does
the moth suck sticky nectar up that flexible tube?
So I challenged two students, Mia London and
Ross Broadhurst, to scale up the problem using sim-
ple components. They chose bucatini, a long hollow

SEPTEMBER 2023 17
E X P L O R E | THE BIG IDEA
pasta, and cunningly controlled its stiffness through
cooking time. Success! They were indeed able to
reproduce the conditions of proboscis drinking. End
of story. Or so we all thought …
A few months later we were back in the lab, bub-
bling up more bucatini—because we’d plunged into
a heated debate over the “best” way to cook pasta.
It began about a year ago, after Giorgio Parisi,
a Nobel Prize–winning Italian physicist, shared
architect Alessandro Busiri Vici’s Facebook post on
an economical way to cook their nation’s favorite
carb. Cut off the heat halfway through cooking and let
the hot water finish the job, Busiri Vici advised. But
“keep the cover always” on, Parisi emphasized, for
insulation and to prevent heat loss from evaporation.
Even though energy and other living costs had
soared in much of Europe, the thrifty suggestion
Parisi and Busiri Vici shared stirred up angry
responses from fellow Italians. “It’s a disaster,” raged
renowned chef Luigi Pomata, admonishing that Parisi
and other physicists should keep well away from the
kitchen. Michelin-starred chef Antonello Colonna
said customers in his restaurant would never tolerate
the rubbery results of the recommended method.
But Colonna mentioned another cost-saving
approach: the “cold water method,” endorsed by
American chef Alton Brown. Defying all culinary
traditions, this starts with the pasta in cold water
and brings everything to the boil together.
Others joined the social media frenzy, tossing in
their opinions, insults, and recipes. Despite Nobel
laureate Parisi’s expertise—his theories uncover
patterns in complex systems, from molecules to
memory, from the flocking of birds to the spinning
of planets—even he might not have predicted the
reactions to his well-intentioned post.
What happens
W H AT I S PA STA , I N S C I E N T I F I C T E R M S ?
when we cook dried pasta? And most important in
the debate about the most delectable frugal-cooking
techniques: Who’s right?
The answer to question one is simple. Dried pasta is
made by adding H2O to ground durum, a subspecies
of Triticum turgidum; that is, by shaping and drying
a mixture of water and semolina flour milled from
durum wheat.
The answer to question number two: When we
cook dried pasta, two processes take place, both
pretty straightforward. First, it must rehydrate and
soften by absorbing water. It does this by diffusion,
Consider the Pastabilities
One indisputable truth of the pasta-cooking experiment: It gave participants
endless opportunities for puns and saucy wordplay. —DF
• A fusilli puns • Orzo they say
• Saving your pennes • Pasta time away
18 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
WHAT IS PASTA , IN
SCIENTIFIC TERMS? WHAT
HAPPENS WHEN WE COOK
D R I E D PA S TA? A N D M O S T
IMP ORTANT IN THE
DEBATE ABOU T THE MOST
DELECTABLE FRUGAL-
COOKING TECHNIQUES:
WHO’S RIGHT?
the same principle as when perfume’s scent spreads
through a room. Driven by diffusion, boiling water
molecules will penetrate to the center of a strand
of typical-thickness spaghetti in about 10 minutes.
Interestingly, diffusion slows down over time; in
pasta twice the typical-spaghetti thickness, the water
would take 40 minutes. This explains why you find
chewy bits when strands get stuck together in the
pot: There simply wasn’t time for water to diffuse
to the center of the clumps.
Second, the pasta must cook, which requires heat.
Like the water, heat also diffuses into the pasta, swell-
ing the proteins, breaking down starch grains, and
making everything edible.
Online tutorials, package instructions, and ChatGPT
generally agree on a standard method to cook pasta.
Per serving: Drop three ounces of pasta into a quart
of vigorously boiling water with a pinch of salt. Add
oil, suggest some. Stir occasionally to stop sticking (or
don’t). Cook for around 10 minutes, enough time for
both heat and water to wiggle their way in. Drain, rinse
(or don’t rinse). Add sauce (or don’t). Serve.
Minor changes in preparation may alter the taste
but won’t affect the cost of cooking, because it all
boils down to the heating. The cost depends on how
much energy is needed to heat the pot, water, and
pasta to 212°F—and then, how much more energy is
needed to keep it boiling for 10 minutes. To calcu-
late precisely, we need to know the price of energy,
whether you’re using electricity or gas, and the type
of stove; the metal the pot’s made of, its thickness and
weight, and the energy needed to heat it …
Mia, Ross, and I
Y E S , W E D I D T H E C A L C U L AT I O N S .
cooked pasta by the standard method, over and over.
• Using your • Penne pincher
noodle • Pasta la vista
PHOTO: ULLSTEIN BILD DTL/GETTY IMAGES; ILLUSTRATION: JAVIER JAÉN SEPTEMBER 2023 19
E X P L O R E | THE BIG IDEA

We calculated the outcomes for various combina-

tions of pot, stove, and energy source, and came
up with an average cooking cost: about a dime a
portion. Heating the water uses most of the energy;
heating the pasta accounts for only one percent of it.
Across the United States, some six billion pounds
of pasta are twirled and slurped every year, costing
an estimated three billion dollars to cook. On a scale
like that, even a small energy savings would make More real-world
a big difference.
Let’s review the possibilities.
science ventures
Parisi and Busiri Vici’s suggestion halves the
energy used in the cooking stage and saves three In addition to the pasta-cooking
of the 10 cents a portion. The cold water method of experiments, David Fairhurst has
chef Brown also reduces the cooking stage, likewise joined colleagues and students
saving around three cents. at Nottingham Trent University in
Using less water will cut cooking costs too. Harold numerous other studies of everyday,
McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, encouraged close-to-home science. Among
New York Times readers years ago to try both a cold the phenomena they’ve explored:
start and reducing the water to a third. He warned • The ideal technique for blowing
the approach “requires more attention” and regular the biggest soap bubbles. During
stirring. But I reckon it would save some six of the a science interactive at Notting-
10 cents. ham Castle, university scientists
On SeriousEats.com, chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt urges asked members of the public
an even more dramatic method. He drops the pasta to blow bubbles while the scien-
into minimal boiling water, stirs when it resumes tists recorded the speed of
boiling, then turns off the heat, covers the pot, and breaths blown at the soap film
waits 10 minutes. Drain, eat—and save eight cents and the size of the bubbles
a portion, by my calculation. formed. The conclusion: Blowing
Then Mia and Ross entered this culinary-science at a steady airspeed of around
contest, and did not disappoint. They tried an alter- 24 or 25 feet a second regularly
native method—presoaking—whose success lies in produced bubbles “up to 10 times
separating the processes of rehydration and cooking. the size” of the wand, Fairhurst
Though water diffusion is much slower at room says. Blow slower, and the bub-
temperature, after two hours the pasta becomes soft. bles won’t detach from the wand;
Once drained, it can be heated briefly in a pot with faster, and they’ll burst before
water or sauce to finish cooking. By avoiding other getting really large.
methods’ generation of steam that escapes and hot • The physical process that occurs
water that’s thrown away—all wasted energy—this when a liquid droplet is left to
approach saves more than nine cents a portion. dry on a solid surface; in particular,
(The website of the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s how it’s affected by gravity. Under-
science museum, has an article, a recipe, and a video standing the evaporation process
about the method.) has implications for a wide range
You might legitimately ask: Why are university of processes, from crop spray-
scientists perfecting the cooking of pasta? Or the ing to virus transmission. Another
blowing of soap bubbles (see adjacent column)? droplet study recruited volun-
Have they not heard about the threat of climate teers to exercise, then examined
change or the challenges of sustainable energy dried drops of their blood drawn
production? Yes, we have. But to tackle these glob- before and after exertion, noting
al issues requires a wider diversity of scientific how patterns differed between
voices and the support of a public that is both resting and exhausted states. The
curious about the discoveries of science and trusting approach shows promise for mon-
in its processes. itoring health and screening for
By lifting the lid on the science of everyday life, diseases. — PAT R I C I A E D M O N D S
we hope to prepare many others to thrive in an
increasingly technological world—and to use their
awareness and passion to protect the planet. j
David Fairhurst is an associate professor at Nottingham Trent
University, England, where he investigates flow and evaporation in
blood, bubbles, droplets, and puddles. He teaches general relativity
and science communication, and runs the postgraduate program.
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E X P L O R E | BREAKTHROUGHS

Telescope spies a third belt

Fomalhaut, a bright star ringed
by two belts of cosmic debris,
D I S PAT C H E S has long intrigued astronomers.
Now there’s more to study:
FROM THE FRONT LINES Images from the James Webb
OF SCIENCE Space Telescope clearly show
A N D I N N OVAT I O N three rings, defined by gaps that
likely are caused by the gravity of
unseen planets. — M E G A N G A N N O N

MEDICINE

Cutting off
oxygen to
kill tumors
Bioengineers in
China have created
a tiny implantable
battery that makes
tumors easier to
destroy by denying
them oxygen and
charges itself on
salt water injected
in nearby tissue. It
hasn’t been tested
yet on humans, but
when inserted into
OCEAN BIOLOGY
the armpits of mice
and used with an

SCANS UNDER THE SEA experimental drug,

it shrank cells that
C O N T A C T L E S S U N D E R W A T E R U LT R A S O U N D R E V E A L S model breast can-
D E T A I L S O F F E M A L E R AY S ’ R E P R O D U C T I V E S Y S T E M S . cer by 90 percent.
The device offers a
Near the end of her 12- to 13-month gestation,
a pregnant reef manta ray sports an impres-
novel strategy for
sive bulge: The fetus folded up in her womb boosting the power
has a wingspan of almost five feet at full of new drugs that
term. But in a reef manta (Mobula alfredi), target oxygen-
pregnancy doesn’t become outwardly depleted cancer
visible until around halfway through cells, visible as
gestation—so a group of scientists in the
green in this tumor
Maldives used contactless underwater sonograms (inset) to study
the rays’ pregnancy and maturity states. Their findings, recently
scan. — F R A N S M I T H
published in the Journal of Fish Biology, were “alarming,” says lead
author Niv Froman (the diver pictured above) of the Manta Trust.
After ultrasounds definitively showed which of the female reef
mantas were reproductively mature versus immature, it seemed
clear that scientists had underestimated the number that were
mature—and likely capable of bearing pups. The new data sug-
gest the population’s fertility rate is lower than earlier estimates,
bringing reef mantas “to an even more vulnerable level than we
previously thought,” Froman says. Could a better understanding of
the impact of local pressures on fertility rates help identify better
manta conservation measures? — M E L I S S A H O B S O N

PHOTOS (FROM TOP): NASA, ESA, CSA (IMAGE PROCESSING BY ANDRÁS GÁSPÁR, U. OF ARIZONA, AND ALYSSA PAGAN, STSCI); GUY STEVENS, MANTA TRUST;
NIV FROMAN, MANTA TRUST, CAMBRIDGE U.; STEVE SEUNG-YOUNG LEE, NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE/U. OF CHICAGO COMPREHENSIVE CANCER CENTER
 TA K E A
S M A RT S T E P
TOWA R D A
MORE SECURE
FUTURE

Establishing a charitable gift annuity

with the National Geographic Society
is a great way to receive guaranteed
payments for life and save on taxes—
while protecting our planet for
generations to come.

P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F E D S O N VA N D E I R A

S I M P L E + S A F E . S E C U R E YO U R F U T U R E W I T H L I F E T I M E PAYM E N T S .
E X P L O R E | PLANET POSSIBLE

To reduce the waste

A GOOD BOUNCE from millions of tennis
balls discarded each
year, groups
FOR RECYCLING have begun
reclaiming
and reusing
BY SARAH GIBBENS the balls’ materials.
P H OTO G RA P H BY R E B E C C A H A L E

U.S. Open, some

AT T H I S M O N T H ’ S
100,000 new tennis balls will be used,
since balls are replaced regularly during
matches. Those balls will be passed on
and used by other players but will even-
tually be trashed—the fate of roughly
125 million balls in the U.S. every year,
according to the nonprofit RecycleBalls.
Discarding those millions is only part
of the environmental toll of the felt-
covered, rubber-cored objects. Rubber
harvested naturally contributes to de-
forestation; the creation of synthetic
rubber can worsen industrial pollution.
And that’s even before the balls get to
landfills, where they release carbon
dioxide as they degrade over decades.
Fortunately, Earth-friendly orga-
nizations are pioneering more
sustainable options. Since 2009, the
French Tennis Federation has been
collecting used tennis balls and send-
ing them to recycling facilities that
remove their exterior and use the rub-
ber for tennis courts. In the U.S., the
Vermont-based RecycleBalls partners
with gyms, athletic clubs, and players
to repurpose the rubber for turf. Peo-
ple in the U.S. with at least a hundred
old tennis balls can ship them to
RecycleBalls and receive a receipt for
their tax-deductible donation.
For those with just a few discarded
tennis balls, there are creative ways
to give them a second life. A ball
sliced in half can be used to twist
stubborn lids off jars. Floating in a
swimming pool, the balls’ wool-and-
nylon exterior collects oils left by
sunscreen. They’re also great toys for
active dogs, though it’s best to limit
chewing time: A ball’s fuzzy covering
can wear down tooth enamel. j
E X P L O R E | T R AV E L R A DA R

Hitting trails in Iceland

WHAT’S
and the Philippines,
NEW AND savoring comebacks in
NOTEWORTHY
AROUND Africa and the U.S. West.
THE WORLD

BY RONAN O’CONNELL

2PEDALING THE PHILIPPINES

B U I LT B Y T H E
COLONIZING SPANISH
IN THE LATE
1 5 0 0 S , M A N I L A’ S

1
WA L L E D D I S T R I C T RWANDAN C O N S E RVAT I O N S U C C E S S
REVIVAL
OF INTRAMUROS IS A decade ago there were no
GETTING A LONG- lions or rhinos in Rwanda’s
Akagera National Park,
AWA I T E D R E N O VAT I O N
largely because of rampant
THAT WILL INCLUDE
poaching following the 1994
DISTINCTIVE DESIGN
SIX MILES OF SCENIC genocide against the Tutsi.
Cool Welcome BIKE LANES. But a collaboration by the
in a Volcanic Land
Resembling the sharp Rwandan government and
hull of an icebreaker, nonprofit African Parks has
the striking building revitalized 277,000 acres
above is a new visitors of wetlands and savanna
center in Iceland’s along Rwanda’s border with
42,000-acre Snæfells-
Tanzania. Now Akagera is a
jökull National Park.
Walking and cycling growing tourist attraction
trails wind through the with some 60 lions, several
park, which hosts some dozen rhinos, more than
of this island nation’s 130 elephants, and about
renowned lava fields, 80 giraffes. “The revival of
sea cliffs, and black-
Akagera is nothing short
sand beaches.
of astounding,” says park
manager Ladis Ndahiriwe.
Akagera “has become a crit-
ical contributor to the local
and national economy.”

HISTORIC STAGES

The elegant—and
some say haunted—
Tabor Opera House, built
in 1879 in mining boom-
town Leadville, Colorado,
is undergoing a $15 million
rehabilitation. A trove of
vintage theatrical scenery
recently was discovered
at this community gath-
ering place, a stop on the
new Colorado Historic
Opera Houses Circuit.

PHOTOS: KARL VILHJÁLMSSON (BUILDING); KARA SANTOS (BIKE);

LYU TIANRAN, XINHUA/ALAMY LIVE NEWS (RHINO); CRAIG HENSEL (STAGE)
 THROUGH THE LENS | E X P L O R E

Photographer Corey Arnold scouts a camera-trap spot near a fence hole used as a pass-through by wildlife in Chicago.

CHASING THE ELUSIVE IMAGE

I N M A N Y O F A M E R I C A’ S U R B A N C E N T E R S , G L I M P S I N G W I L D A N I M A L S
IS BECOMING EASIER. BUT PHOTOGRAPHING THEM? NOT SO MUCH.

BY COREY ARNOLD

WHEN I LANDED A feature assignment for National
Geographic about urban wildlife in the United States,
I was elated. There was just one problem: I had to
figure out how to photograph wild animals on the
move at night.
I had dreamed of delving into a long-term pho-
tography project about these citified critters ever
since my college days in San Francisco, when I was
“mugged” by a raccoon. I used to roam the streets
after dark, shooting the evocative, dimly lit land-
scapes, and one night I suddenly saw a raccoon
stand up like a human before running toward me
and persuading me to relinquish my bag of Cheetos.
While I did manage to capture the tense moment
right before the charge, almost every subsequent
attempt to record raccoon behavior and add to the
series was a blurry failure. But I was determined to
one day figure out how to surmount the obstacles.
Twenty years later, I had the perfect excuse to
do exactly that. I would be spending months in
the field documenting urban wildlife. My task for
this assignment was to capture the hidden lives
of raccoons, black bears, and coyotes—experts at
hiding and scavenging—in several U.S. cities. The
images could help answer questions about adap-
tation: Do city animals become bolder and more
E X P L O R E | THROUGH THE LENS

THE LOCAL BEARS WERE

GROWING INCREA SINGLY
BOLD AND EVEN SKIPPING
TORPOR, THEIR WINTER
RESTING STATE, BECAUSE
TOWN GARBAGE PROVIDED
AN EASY YEAR-RO U N D
F O O D S U P P LY.

sophisticated in human-made landscapes, through

the daily challenges of finding food and shelter?
With help from National Geographic photo
engineer Tom O’Brien, I was outfitted with several
custom-built camera-trap setups. Each included
three strobes in waterproof housings, an armored
camera box, a pile of cables, and an infrared motion
sensor—equipment I found unfamiliar and compli-
cated, with countless variables that could go wrong
in all sorts of ways.
What originally drew me to urban night photogra-
phy is how terrain is transformed: Street and building
lights of myriad color temperatures cast interesting
shadows and highlight objects that aren’t noticeable
during the day. I needed to harness the mysterious
power of the after-dark hours while freezing the
action of animals going about their nocturnal busi-
ness at unpredictable times. So the camera traps
became my indispensable tools.
I spent weeks in Chicago chasing the city’s numer-
ous but elusive coyotes. Most of my traps were never
visited by the animals at all; when traps were visited,
they captured shots ruined by a faulty focus, a flash
that didn’t go off, or a snowstorm that clouded the
lens. On the rare occasions that I got a clear image,
it was often of a coyote butt instead of a face. And
when animals noticed the camera or were spooked
by its flash, they soon learned just to walk around it.
Over time, I was learning how to predict the ani-
mals’ behavior—for example, knowing that coyotes
navigate by city railroad tracks to avoid car traffic. I
began using less expensive, off-the-shelf video trail
cameras to surveil areas, analyze how the animals
were reacting to the traps, and make adjustments. huff, stamped his front paws, and gnashed his jaws, a
Then, when I was at home between forays into the warning that we were not invited to his nap. Toogee
field, I posted a callout on Instagram, asking followers didn’t flinch, and we quietly backed out.
if they knew of any urban wildlife hot spots I should Toogee explained that the local bears were growing
check out. I was flooded with amazing stories of increasingly bold and even skipping torpor, their
human-animal encounters across the country. One winter resting state, because town garbage provided
of those responses led me to a man named Toogee an easy year-round food supply. Sugary human food
Sielsch in the densely populated resort town of South had made the bears 25 percent larger than nonurban
Lake Tahoe, California, where he had become the bears, he said, and prone to tooth decay. People found
go-to expert for black bear problems. the bears denning under their houses and in culverts
A few weeks later I was following Toogee into during the day, then scavenging at night.
the crawl space under an abandoned house in his With the bear likely to leave the property that night
neighborhood when a black bear let out a massive to look for food, I searched for the best place to set up

28 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
my camera trap to capture his departure. There was
a decent chance he would clamber through a hole
in the surrounding wooden fence, one of two possi-
ble exit routes. I worked all afternoon and late into
the night configuring my lighting to complement the
glow from nearby streetlamps. My camera was on a
tripod with no way to lock it down to prevent theft,
so I couldn’t leave it there for weeks as I had at other
locations. I needed to get the shot in one night, and
everything had to operate perfectly. I left the scene,
lest the bear get wind of me, and hoped for the best.
When I returned early the next morning and ner-
vously pressed the camera’s image-review button,
In South Lake Tahoe,
California, a large black
bear emerges from the
property where he sleeps
under an abandoned house.
the first frame was the one you see above. Not a
blurry butt, but a sharp and magnificent face staring
right back at me.
During the many months I worked on this project,
I came to see that these four-legged city slickers
are indeed learning ways to adapt to living among
people. And I learned a thing or two from them. j

SEPTEMBER 2023 29
EXPLORING THE OTHERWORLDLY BEAUTY OF
’S UPPER PENINSULA
By Stacey Cook

PA I D C O N T E N T F O R

AS A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER, MICHAEL GEORGE HAS TRAVELED ALL OVER THE WORLD
IN SEARCH OF NEW PLACES AND PERSPECTIVES. FOR HIS NEXT ADVENTURE, HE HAD A UNIQUE PLACE
IN MIND: MICHIGAN’S UPPER PENINSULA, A REMOTE PLACE OF SPECTACULAR NATURAL BEAUTY.

›› Starting in Marquette, a vibrant college get on mainland Michigan—to Copper Harbor

town on Lake Superior, Michael found a warm
community of artists and outdoor enthusiasts.
He grabbed a bite at BODEGA, a restaurant
inside a renovated 1884 schoolhouse building,
where owner Libby Nelson is passionate about
sourcing food from local farmers and bringing
people together. Downtown Marquette offers
a convenient access point to Presque Isle Park,
a local favorite known for hiking through pine
forests, watching the sunset, and swimming
««iÀ>ÀLÀ>ÀiViÀÌwi`
at Black Rocks, which is home to some of the
planet's oldest volcanic rocks.
›› Fueled by Marquette’s energy, Michael
headed north—as far north as a person can
at the top of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Brockway
Mountain is a sought-after destination for
mountain bikers, where more than 40 miles
of singletrack comprises one of the best trail
systems in the world.
Nightlife in Copper Harbor means tipping
your head back to take in the stars: one of
the best spots being Brockway Mountain
Overlook°*>ÀÌÃv
as an International Dark Sky Park, and visitors
from all over the world come to see the aurora
borealis. But even when the northern lights
are elusive, the starry night sky is a wonder
all its own.
 PA I D C O N T E N T F O R P U R E M I C H I G A N

›› From Copper Harbor, Michael hopped on
a seaplane to venture deeper into the wild.
Isle Royale National Park is a remote and
rugged archipelago that can be accessed only
by ferry or seaplane. The best way to explore
this isolated stretch of wilderness is by gliding
along the clear, cold water of Lake Superior
in a kayak or canoe. But there’s plenty to see
by land, too—backpackers can trek 165 miles
of trails and stay in secluded campsites.
}ÌÕÃiÃ]>`wÃiÀið
Ý«
ÀiÀÃ
Isle Royale is designated as an International
Biosphere Reserve for its unique ecosystem.
There’s a boreal forest to the east and a
>`ÃÃÌÀiÌV}ÌÌiÀâ]
temperate hardwood forest to the west.
Gray wolves arrived by crossing an ice bridge
that formed between the island and mainland
Canada in the winter of 1948. During this part of
the journey, Michael got to meet Rolf Peterson,
>ÀiÃi>ÀViÀÜ>ÃëiÌwÛi`iV>`iÃÃÌÕ`Þ}
how the island’s wolf and moose populations
affect each other.
While researchers study the island, its landscape
keeps a record of human history in well-preserved
ëÜÀiV Ã]
have always been drawn to the Lake Superior
region. As Michael boarded the seaplane again
ÌyÞÛiÀÃ
he couldn’t wait to come back.

“
I've seen many beautiful
landscapes on my travels in
the U.P., but I feel it's the people
that really bring it to life.
”

National Geographic Photographer

MICHAEL GEORGE

This is paid content. This content does not necessarily reflect the views of National Geographic or its editorial staff.
E X P L O R E
Protecting mangroves
is key to mitigating
climate change,
this ecologist says.
When Angelo Bernardino’s family had
Sunday lunches at a favorite restaurant
in Vitória, his hometown on Brazil’s
Atlantic coast, “right next to us were
mangroves,” the National Geographic
Explorer and marine ecologist recalls.
The trees teemed with mosquitoes
but were “beautiful and pristine.” He
was captivated.
After decades studying ocean eco-
systems, Bernardino now places special
emphasis on mangroves. He’s part of
the National Geographic and Rolex
Perpetual Planet Amazon Expedition,
a series of scientific research projects
spanning the Amazon River Basin.
Coastal trees and shrubs character-
ized by their gnarled, exposed roots,
mangroves thrive in places other plants
don’t: where rivers meet oceans in trop-
ical and subtropical regions, typically
in brackish, but sometimes in fresh,
water. Examining mangroves means
racing against time, as their roots are
This article was supported by Rolex, which is partnering with the National Geographic
Society on science-based expeditions to explore, study, and document change in
the planet’s unique regions.
In a mangrove forest in
Brazil’s Bailique district,
Bernardino takes measure-
ments of a tree trunk.
accessible only when the tide is out.
Bernardino and colleagues wait in their
boat for low tide, then wade into the
tangle of roots and take soil samples,
measurements, and photos. After about
four hours, they scramble to leave
before a 12-foot-tall wave, the pororoca,
rushes in and floods their workspace.
Mangroves are vital to the region’s
climate change mitigation efforts, Ber-
nardino says, as they absorb salt and
carbon and need little oxygen. The Bra-
zilian government’s current emissions
reduction goals don’t stress mangrove
protection; Bernardino hopes the data
he gathers will influence that policy.
Some 2,500 acres of Amazon man-
groves fall to deforestation each year;
cutting them releases up to four times
as much carbon as cutting the same
amount of upland trees, Bernardino’s
team recently found. “Now we know,”
he says, “what happens when man-
groves are disturbed.” — N ATA S H A DA LY
PHOTO: COREY ROBINSON
 © 2023 Mars or Affiliates.

Cleaning your dog’s teeth

doesn’t have to be difficult
E X P L O R E | ARTIFACT
SHOES THAT HIT THE
HEIGHT OF FASHION
I N R E N A I S S A N C E I T A LY, T H E
CHOPINE PUT NOBLE WOMEN
O N A P E D E S T A L — L I T E R A L LY.
From left: A Venetian
chopine that’s nearly
two feet tall and a version
that’s 11⅞ inches tall are
made from wood covered
in leather. The blue velvet
chopine adorned with
gold lace rises a relatively
modest 5½ inches. All three
examples date to the late
16th or early 17th centuries.
PHOTOS (FROM LEFT): FLORENTINE CIVIC MUSEUMS PHOTO LIBRARY; ELIZABETH DAY MCCORMICK COLLECTION, MUSEUM
32 OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON; LEA CHRISTIANO, BROOKLYN MUSEUM COSTUME COLLECTION, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
W E H AV E B E E Nstanding tall in shoes
for a very long time. Women in ancient
Greece and Rome wore thick-soled san-
dals. Qabaqib, wooden clogs, kept feet
high and dry in bathhouses across the
Ottoman Empire.
But the skyscraper of footwear was
arguably the chopine, worn by noble
Venetian women in the late 1500s. The
tallest known example of this platform
shoe (left), now in Florence’s Museo
Stefano Bardini, tops out at almost two
feet. A shorter but still impressively
lofty one (center) is on display at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from
September 9 through January 7.
Venetian chopines were not meant
to be seen, says Elizabeth Semmelhack,
director of the Bata Shoe Museum
in Toronto (which also showcases a
chopine). They were hidden under
the wearers’ skirts. The higher the
shoe, the longer the skirt, allowing
for a greater display of the opulent
textiles that proclaimed family wealth
and were a foundation of the economy
in Venice.
Brides braving the shoes for the
first time went to a ballet master to
learn how to walk. But extremely high
chopines required the support of an
attendant on either side of the wearer,
who advanced “like a parade float,”
says Semmelhack.
For these elevated ladies with their
sidecars of servants, chopines tele-
graphed status—much as a pair of
Manolo Blahnik pumps does today.
— C AT H Y N E W M A N
 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C SEPTEMBER 2023

Dome of the Rock . . . . . . P. 34

Cypress Forests . . . . . . . . . . . P. 62
Chile’s Glaciers . . . . . . . . . . . . P. 86
Mozambique
Wildlife Reserve . . . . . . . . P. 108

F EAT U R E S

AT A SACRED LOCATION IN

108 NIAS SA RESERVE , THE SPIRIT S

OF ANCESTORS ARE BELIEVED
TO ENDURE IN THE FORM OF
BABOONS, AMBLING ON ALL
FOURS AMONG THE PILGRIMS.

PHOTO: THOMAS PESCHAK

34
 Crowning Jerusalem’s
sacred mount, the
Dome of the Rock is a
place of both prayer
and protest. Extensive
restoration and archae-
ological research are
uncovering fresh clues
to the shrine’s origins.

THE DOME OF THE ROCK—AN ARCHITECTURAL MASTERPIECE

AND ISLAM’S THIRD HOLIEST SITE—IS REVEALING ITS SECRETS
TO SCHOLARS GRANTED UNPRECEDENTED ACCESS.
BY ANDREW LAWLER
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y Z I YA H GA F I Ć
 At the heart of the
Dome of the Rock is
a limestone outcrop
revered by Muslims as
the place from which
Muhammad ascended
on his mystical journey
into heaven. One of
the world’s largest
collections of Islamic
mosaics covers some
13,000 square feet of
the shrine’s interior.
‘ANY VIEWER’S
TONGUE WILL
GROW SHORTER
TRYING TO
DESCRIBE IT,’
marveled the inveterate traveler Ibn Battuta while visiting
Jerusalem in 1326. “This is one of the most fantastic of all
buildings, of the most perfect in architecture and strangest
in shape.”
For more than 13 centuries, the Dome of the Rock has
been the jewel in the crown of Jerusalem’s sacred acropolis,
a sprawling area known to Jews and Christians as the Temple
Mount and to Muslims as the Haram al Sharif—the Noble
Sanctuary. As Islam’s oldest building, the dome ranks with
the neighboring Church of the Holy Sepulchre in spiritual
importance and the Taj Mahal in grace. Simple geometry
dressed in sumptuous materials gives this iconic structure
a timeless appeal.
One chilly winter morning, the shrine slowly fills with
women in long coats and hijabs. They sit on the plush red-
and-gold carpet, alone in contemplation or in small groups to
study the Quran. While men flock to the much larger Al Aqsa
Mosque a hundred yards to the south, this tranquil space is
mostly the domain of Muslim women and children.
Sireen Karim, a middle-age kindergarten teacher dressed
in black, gestures at the mass of stone that dominates the
center of the building.
“This is where Muhammad, peace be upon him, ascended
A mother and her to heaven to meet all the prophets, and where he came back
daughters pray in the
Well of Souls, a grotto with the message to pray five times a day,” she says. “It also
beneath the venerated healed his sadness. And this is where we come to cure our
stone. Here, according grief and ease a troubled state of mind.”
to some, the spirits
of the dead await the The sacred slab is the color of moon rock, its coarse
final judgment. and pitted surface contrasting sharply with the splendor

38 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
surrounding it. Two concentric rings of mar-
ble and porphyry columns and piers encircle
it, supporting a dome laced with fantastically
intricate shapes. The walls carry flowing Arabic
inscriptions, as well as one of the world’s largest
collections of medieval mosaics. From below,
these tiny glass-cubed pixels resolve into lush
palms, ripe grapes, and a fortune in diadems and
necklaces. An occasional pigeon flies through
one of the four open doors, whirring in circles
within the round expanse.
A narrow set of worn marble steps leads
beneath the rock to a rough-hewn grotto called
the Well of Souls. A Muslim tradition asserts the
waters of paradise flow under the cave, while
some Christians and Jews have long imagined
that the space conceals a secret passage filled
with valuable artifacts.
In 1911 European treasure hunters bribed
their way inside and hacked away at the cave
floor in vain hope of finding the famed Ark of the
Covenant. Their desecration sparked weeks of
angry rioting. Seventy years later, senior Israeli
rabbis bored a hole at the base of the Western
Wall and tunneled their way east to try to locate
the sacred object. The illicit search yielded
nothing but a brief scuffle between rabbinical
students and Muslim guards and fears of a
regional conflict.
The Dome of the Rock has miraculously
survived looters, earthquakes, religious strife,
bloody invasions, and more prosaic threats
UNDER THE DOME 39
Only Muslims may
worship in the dome
and the surrounding
36-acre Al Aqsa com-
pound—a rule dating
back centuries meant
to maintain Jerusalem’s
fragile peace. But a
growing number of
Jews demand the right
to pray on the plaza,
threatening to upend
the tradition.
like pigeon droppings clogging its drainpipes,
sending rainwater trickling into the walls. Its
striking image adorns coffee mugs, tea towels,
and screensavers, and framed pictures of its
dome hang in mosques, living rooms, and pub-
lic buildings around the world.
“Almost two billion people are connected to
this place,” says Sheikh Omar Kiswani, director
of the 36-acre religious complex, as we stand
on the sunlit stone platform that supports the
dome like the setting of a jewel. “When the
Prophet Muhammad descended from heaven,
by God’s wish, all the prophets gathered here
to pray,” says the bearded cleric, sweeping his
arms to take in the paths, gardens, courtyards,
and buildings that are considered a single vast
mosque. “That’s why praying here is equal to
500 prayers elsewhere.”
Today the Dome of the Rock also stands at the
center of one of the world’s thorniest geopolit-
ical disputes, and its golden vault is a frequent
backdrop to violent confrontations between
Palestinian worshippers and Israeli police.
“Any church or synagogue in the Holy Land
is a place of peace,” says Kiswani, sighing. “Only
here is it a war zone.”
Muslims extol the shrine as Islam’s most
important site after Mecca and Medina, while
Palestinians honor it as the cherished symbol
of their nation. For many religious Jews, how-
ever, the structure is an abomination fated to be
destroyed to make way for a new Jewish temple.
Some evangelical Christians also insist it must
be replaced by a new temple to set in motion
the return of Jesus Christ. Such a volatile mix
of beliefs sends shudders through politicians
across the region, who fear any attempt to raze
it would result in a catastrophic war.
Yet while the Taj Mahal and the Holy Sepul-
chre have clear origins as tombs for famous
people, the reason for the dome’s construction
is a source of contention and uncertainty.
“We have to strip away the politics imposed
‘WE HAVE TO STRIP AWAY THE POLITICS
IMPOSED ON THE BUILDING, LIKE PEELING AN ONION,
TO UNDERSTAND WHY AND HOW IT WAS BUILT.’
— B E AT R I C E S T. L A U R E N T, A R T H I S T O R I A N
42
on the building, like peeling an onion, to under-
stand why and how it was built,” says Beatrice
St. Laurent, an American art historian who
studied the site for 30 years with her Palestinian
colleague, Isam Awwad, who passed away in
2018. Their results provide an intriguing new
take on the mysterious old shrine and the vision-
ary Muslim leader who might have built it.
IX CENTURIES AFTERthe Romans
destroyed Jerusalem and its Jew-
ish Temple complex, the acrop-
olis lay in ruins. For Byzantine
Christians, this desolation was
proof that their faith had tri-
umphed over Judaism. A Muslim
army took control of Christianity’s holiest city
without a fight just a few years after Muham-
mad’s death in Medina in A.D. 632. When the
new rulers sought to establish their own place
of worship in Jerusalem, the choice was obvious.
One tale has it that Muhammad’s father-in-
law, Umar, personally cleared away filth and
debris to expose the sacred outcrop. It would
be several decades before a building rose over
that chunk of revered bedrock. According to
early sources, the architects were two Jerusalem
residents: a Muslim theologian named Raja ibn
Haywa, and a Christian named Yazid ibn Salam.
They didn’t have to look far for inspiration.
The fourth-century Holy Sepulchre, with its
massive rotunda over what Christians believe
is the tomb of Jesus, lay within sight. And eight-
sided churches—a shape with roots in ancient
Rome—stood at Caesarea on the nearby Med-
iterranean coast and along the Sea of Galilee.
In 1992 construction workers expanding the
highway from Jerusalem to Bethlehem encoun-
tered the ruins of another octagonal building.
Rina Avner of the Israel Antiquities Authority
led the subsequent excavation in an olive grove
next to a gas station. (Continued on page 54)
The Cotton Merchants’
Gate, one of seven
providing access from
Jerusalem’s Old City
into the Al Aqsa com-
pound, dates to the
14th century. Israeli
security tightly con-
trols every entry point,
leading at times to
protests and violent
confrontations.
A Jewish cemetery on
the Mount of Olives,
a ridge opposite Jeru-
salem’s Old City, offers
a sweeping view of
the gleaming golden
dome. Some Jewish
extremists see the
Islamic shrine as a blas-
phemous monument
that should be demol-
ished to make way for
a restored temple.
SHAPED BY FAITH
Jerusalem’s Old City is layered with history, beliefs, and divisions. It’s the site of
two now vanished temples that for centuries were the central place of Jewish
worship. It’s where Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have been resurrected after
his Crucifixion. Here too is the stone Muslims revere as the spot where the Prophet
Muhammad began his nighttime journey to heaven. These events consecrated
the city to three great religions, leading to eras of both peace and bloodshed.

LEBANON
Territories in dispute Boundary claimed
Israel captured East Jerusalem, by Syria
the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip
during the 1967 Six Day War. Despite GOLAN SYRIA
HEIGHTS
condemnation from the international
community, Israel continues to build
West Bank settlements where some Sea of After 1860, Jerusalem
450,000 Israelis live among more Galilee expanded beyond
than 2.5 million Palestinians. the Old City walls.
JORDAN

WE S T
WE
B AN K ST
IS R B A N K
EAST
Me d i t e r r a n e a n A EL JERUSALEM
Sea Green Line
JERUSALEM 1949-1967
AREA OLD CITY
Dead Jerusalem
GAZA Sea city limit WEST
STRIP JERUSALEM

EL
NK
ISRA

BA
I S R A E L

WEST
2 mi
2 km
EGYP

DAN

Controversial capital
JOR

A
T

O PE S
I
Israel named Jerusalem its capital in
EUR 1949 and annexed East Jerusalem from
A

Jordan after the Six Day War. The Green

Line (dashed) marks the UN-brokered
boundary. Palestinians claim East
ISRAEL
Jerusalem as their future capital.
R AREA
A
F

IC
A

Gulf of
Aqaba

IMPRINT OF circa 1000-930 B.C.

The Israelites capture the
circa 930-720
The capital city expands
720-586
Jerusalem remains the capi-

THREE MILLENNIA small walled settlement

from the Jebusites.
to include the high
ground of Mount Moriah.
tal of Judah as the northern
kingdom of Israel falls.
Continuously settled
since the Bronze Age,
Jerusalem has been Present-day
Old City
shaped by successive
rulers and empires. TEMPLE TEMPLE
According to the Bible, MOUNT MOUNT
1,000 ft Mount
Israelite kings captured Moriah Temple Temple
250 m (exact location (exact location
the city and built a temple unknown) unknown)
on the site Muslims now OPHEL
call Haram al Sharif. City wall
Settled area CITY OF
DAVID
 OLD CITY TODAY
The 224-acre area is home to more
than 30,000 people, some two-thirds
residing in the Muslim Quarter. Over Herod’s
a hundred synagogues, churches, and Gate
mosques are interspersed among
houses, shops, archaeological sites,
and government buildings.
R
Damascus E
Gate T
400 ft R
100 m
A
Lions’

U
Gate

Q
ry ls
ntu wal
e
-c an
t h om

M
6
1 tt
New O

I
Gate

L
Golden
S
C H R I S T I A N Gate
HARAM
U
AL SHARIF
Dome of
M

Church of the the Chain

Holy Sepulchre Cotton
Merchants’
Gate Dome of
Q U A R T E R the Rock

Al Aqsa
Western Mosque
Wall
Jaffa Tower of Al Marwani
Gate David Mosque
J E W I S H
Citadel
EL
OPH
(Al Qala)
Q U A R T E R
ARMENIAN
Dung
Gate
Q UA R T E R CITY
OF
DAVID

16th-century Zion
Ottoman walls Gate

19-4 B.C. A.D. 638-1099 1099-1187 1516-1917

King Herod the Great, Muslim leader Umar Christian Crusaders seize Ottoman Turks gain control
appointed by Rome, reno- captures the city; the Jerusalem and repurpose of the city. The Old City’s
vates the Temple complex. Dome of the Rock is built. sacred buildings. present walls date to this era.

Church of the Church of the

Holy Sepulchre Holy Sepulchre
(A.D. 335)

HARAM Templum HARAM

AL SHARIF Domini AL SHARIF
Temple Pasha’s
complex Dome of Dome of
the Rock Templars’ Residence the Rock
Center
Palaces Citadel
Al Aqsa Al Aqsa
Mosque Mosque

MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK AND PATRICIA HEALY, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: SURVEY OF

ISRAEL; THE CARTA JERUSALEM ATLAS, CARTA JERUSALEM; PLANET LABS, INC.;
ERIC H. CLINE, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
 DOM

A SITE FOR
Pieces of the past Roof refresh
Many interior mosaics have The original roofing material was
survived. Seventh-century replaced with durable lead, last-

THE CENTURIES
exterior mosaic fragments were ing more than 900 years. In 1993 Gilt co
discovered in the 1960s, offer- golden panels replaced the leaky In
ing clues to previous designs. aluminum roof built in the ’60s. la

The Dome of the Rock—built during the Muslim Umayyad

dynasty and gracing Jerusalem’s skyline—has been reno-
vated and restored over 13 centuries. Its core elements,
7TH C ENT U R Y
however, have been preserved throughout the ages.
New details of its many architectural changes are coming Plaster Paint Mosaic
to light as experts delve into historical records, archival (Interior)
photographs, and remnants of its original facade.
0.4 in
Actual-size mosaic
piece (tessera)

Painted
The octagonal Dome beam
H AR AM AL SH ARI F
of the Rock has four (present day)
entrances facing the
cardinal directions.
Views over time
Early windows were marble
N

lattice. During the ’60s

renovations, experts used
Dome of Ottoman-era techniques to
the Rock
restore stained-glass windows.

Western Dome of
Wall the Chain Present
Al Aqsa
Mosque
7th c.

Exterior
mosaic

Glass
Stained and tile
glass (exterior)
(interior)
Stone Marble
102 ft

Well of Souls Recycled elements

A small prayer room 65-ft Spolia, or objects reused from
inside a natural cave lies diameter other buildings, can be found
just below the rock. in the multihued stone columns
and some of the veined marble
slabs adorning lower walls.
Later
addition

Platform Cave
South
entrance

Period of major restoration Reported earthquake

700 A.D. 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300

660-691 1022-1038 1141-1150 1187-1193

Debris on the sacred hill is cleared; Earthquakes damage the dome; European Christian Crusaders Muslim leader Saladin removes
the Umayyads build the Dome the Muslim Fatimid dynasty adds pave over the rock and erect an the altar and refurbishes the
of the Rock around a rocky outcrop. a lead roof and repairs mosaics. altar encircled by a metal barrier. dome’s colorful interior.

PORTIONS OF THE “7TH CENTURY” ILLUSTRATIONS WHERE NO

 Finial
E MATERIAL
Changing patterns
The shrine’s exterior was once
covered with mosaics. Since
opper/brass Lead Anodized Gold-plated the 1500s, it’s been clad with
nstalled 1023 aluminum brass tiles bearing inscriptions and
te 600s 1964 1993 geometric and botanical motifs.

Dome
decoration

P R ESEN T
unknown

Wooden Exterior
rib ceramic tiles
Window over time

Inscription
Buttresses
added for
support

Wooden
truss Lead
roof
Structural support
Under the elaborate facade
are coarse stone-block walls
extending to bedrock below.
The walls have changed little
Wooden Decorative since their original construction.
screen ceiling

Interior
Inscription mosaic
Structural
Open access stone wall
to rock
Dome of the Chain
This tiled, 11-sided pavilion has
Tile spoliated columns and geomet-
ric flooring. It has undergone
Well multiple renovations alongside
of Souls its larger contemporary.
entrance

Stone paver Carpet over

2 ft lower marble floor

Columns and piers Marble

sitting directly floor
on bedrock

1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000

1260-1510 1545-1566 1720-1721 1874-1876 1958-1965 1993-2016

The Mamluks, ruling from Egypt, Ottoman Suleyman the Magnifi- A lead roof, wooden beams, Maintenance of the exte- The dome, 45,000 Work includes a new dome
restore the roof, mosaics, and cent transforms the exterior with and windows are replaced rior requires stripping the tiles, and all windows and the conservation of
intricately patterned floors. tile and stained-glass windows. as part of restorations. facade to bare stone. are replaced. millions of mosaic pieces.

MONICA SERRANO AND PATRICIA HEALY, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: CAPITALIZING JERUSALEM: MUAWIYA’S URBAN VISION 638-680, BY BEATRICE ST. LAURENT
O REFERENCE FROM THE PERIOD EXISTS ARE AN ARTISTIC RECONSTRUCTION. AND ISAM AWWAD (FORTHCOMING); BEATRICE ST. LAURENT, BRIDGEWATER STATE UNIVERSITY; HEBA MOSTAFA, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
The Dome of the Rock is a
place for pilgrimage and
prayer for those of the
Muslim faith.

MUSLIM
RULERS
BROUGHT
ARTISANS
FROM DISTANT
PLACES TO
JERUSALEM.
THE RESULT
WAS A
REMARKABLE
SYNTHESIS OF
TRADITIONS
FROM THE FAR
ENDS OF THE
ISLAMIC EMPIRE.

Women enter the stair-

well leading below the
sacred rock to the Well
of Souls. Marble panels,
rich gilding, and glass
mosaics likely made
by Persian craftsmen
embellish the shrine’s

13,000 45,000 1,380 12,800

interior. Arabic inscrip-
tions proclaim the
primacy of Allah and
S Q F T, D O M E C E RA M I C T I L E S 24 - K A RAT- G O L D - SQ FT OF INTERIOR spurn the Christian
P L AT E D RO O F PA N E L S M O SA I C S doctrine of the Trinity.
UNDER THE DOME 53
She determined it was the long-lost Church of the
Kathisma, or the Seat of Mary. Built in A.D. 456,
the church’s inner and outer rings surround a
sofa-size rock said to be where Mary, pregnant
with Jesus, rested on her way to Bethlehem.
Avner believes the church, which became a pop-
ular pilgrimage site for early Muslims, served as
a model for the Dome of the Rock three miles to
the north. “This was a time when Christian holy
places could still be shared,” she says, “and their
lore and beliefs carried over into Islam.”
ET THE DOME OF THE ROCK is
not simply a grander copy of a
Christian sanctuary. Instead of
the austere facade of most Byz-
antine churches, the shrine’s
original exterior was sheathed
in glass mosaics that blazed in
the Jerusalem sun. The building’s four doors that
open to the cardinal points also have no obvious
precedent in the region.
Domed palaces with four entrances and
churches with exterior mosaics did exist more
than a thousand miles to the south in the
wealthy kingdom of Saba in southwest Arabia,
according to St. Laurent, a Harvard-trained art
historian, and Awwad, the longtime chief archi-
tect and conservator of the Noble Sanctuary.
They also point out that the intricate mosaics
show influence from the Sasanian Empire to the
east in what is today Iraq and Iran.
The crowns that form a motif recall royal
headgear captured from the Sasanian monarch
by Islamic forces. These influences suggest that
Muslim rulers brought artisans from distant
places to Jerusalem. The builders also gathered
stones and columns from Jerusalem’s Jewish,
Roman, and Byzantine ruins to incorporate
into the structure. The result was a remarkable
synthesis of traditions from the far ends of the
fast-expanding Islamic empire.
Once completed, the dome became for a time
the scene of elaborate rituals. Early chroniclers
record attendants dressed in costly robes,
anointing the rock with a golden oil made of
saffron, musk, and ambergris. Others spread
incense into the air with censers, the smoke
spreading into the city as a sweet-smelling call
to prayer and drawing pilgrims and shopkeepers
to circle the stone, a practice that may have its
roots in pre-Islamic Arabian traditions.
54 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
But why did Muslim leaders pour so much
time, effort, and money into this richly orna-
mented shrine? For today’s believers such
as Karim and Kiswani, it celebrates the Proph-
et’s mystical journey into the skies. There is,
however, no mention of that association in
the few texts that are contemporary with the
dome’s construction.
Some argue that the new Umayyad dynasty,
established in 661, sought to bolster Jerusalem’s
prestige at the expense of Mecca, the power
center of its political foes. The Dome of the
Rock, according to this thinking, was designed
to rival the Kaaba, a sanctuary centered on a
sacred stone that Muslim pilgrims circle. Others
insist that the dome asserted Islam’s presence
in what was then an overwhelmingly Christian
city; they note its cupola is almost identical in
size to the Holy Sepulchre’s largest dome.
What is certain is that the building pays hom-
age to the piece of bedrock at its heart. Along
with the story of Muhammad’s mystical ascen-
sion, there are claims it marks the spot where
Adam was created, where Abraham nearly sac-
rificed his son Isaac, and where the dead will
be judged at the end of time. Some say it is the
site of the holiest part of the vanished Jewish
sanctuaries. The Quran mentions Solomon, and
the Umayyad rulers may have chosen to honor a
stone many associated with that famously wise
king. When Crusaders from Europe conquered
Jerusalem after a ferocious fight in 1099, they
mistook the dome for Solomon’s temple and
made it a church.
the primary
N T I L R E C E N T LY,
evidence for pinpointing the
dome’s date of construction
and its principal patron was an
inscription on one of the build-
ing’s arcades. The mosaic let-
tering records the year 691 and
probably the name of Umayyad caliph Abd al
Malik, who reigned then, though his name was
replaced by a later ruler eager to take credit. Abd
al Malik has therefore long been presumed to be
the building’s founder, with the date marking
either the start or end of construction.
But a golden opportunity—quite literally—to
gather fresh clues came in the early 1990s when
the dome was in desperate need of repairs follow-
ing a botched renovation by an Egyptian team
in the 1960s. Though Israel controls security
on the acropolis, the king of Jordan remains
custodian of the holy site. King Hussein sold his
London home to raise $8.2 million to purchase
176 pounds of 24-karat gold plating to gild the
exterior dome. Workers also removed modern
aluminum and concrete repairs and replaced
them with traditional materials, including
mahogany beams and lead sheets.
Awwad managed the ’90s restoration and
allowed St. Laurent to document the process.
Seizing this rare chance, the two scholars probed
the building from foundation to finial, crawl-
ing among the rafters, scrutinizing more than
a thousand old photographs, and locating dis-
carded materials from earlier renovations.
One of their most intriguing finds is that
the famous inscription was placed over earlier
mosaics. Based on this and other evidence,
St. Laurent and Awwad argue that the building’s
first benefactor was Abd al Malik’s predeces-
sor, the controversial founder of the Umayyad
dynasty named Muawiya. A merchant’s son who
became one of Muhammad’s scribes, Muawiya
was a “brilliant and wily opportunist,” according
to one Islamic historian. He became governor of
Syria, a region that included Jerusalem, as strife
broke out among contending leaders of the
nascent empire. The traumatic conflict split
the Muslim community between what came to
be known as Sunnis and Shiites.
After his rival was assassinated in 661,
Muawiya embarked on a monumental build-
ing program, including repairing the walls and
gates of the Noble Sanctuary. St. Laurent and
Awwad contend that the Dome of the Rock was
part of that massive project, and it was designed
as a seat of royal power as well as for religious
purposes. “It looks just like the crowns in its
mosaics,” St. Laurent notes of the building’s
distinct geometric shape and bejeweled exterior.
Their most controversial claim is that the
shrine was open not only to Muslims but also
THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL CLAIM IS THAT
DURING A PERIOD OF RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE,
THE SHRINE WAS OPEN TO MEMBERS OF OTHER FAITHS.
to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians during
what St. Laurent calls “a period of inclusivity.”
As commander of the faithful, Muawiya asserted
his role as leader of all the monotheistic faiths.
That the city’s new Islamic rulers allowed Jews
to return and permitted Christian worship is well
attested in contemporary documents, support-
ing the idea of a fleeting era of something more
than simple religious tolerance. Seen this way,
says St. Laurent, the dome was the diadem in
“Muawiya’s vision of unity.”
UCH HARMONY IS ELUSIVE in
the modern Holy City. In 1984,
encouraged by an extremist
mentor, Yehuda Etzion gathered
660 pounds of stolen dynamite
and a handful of other ultra-
nationalist Jews. Their goal was
to blow up the dome.
“It was necessary,” Etzion explains calmly
when I visit his home inside a well-guarded West
Bank settlement. “This was the only way to build
the third temple.” Many Jews believe the dome
stands on the site of the two previous temples.
An informant tipped off police before the group
could act, and Etzion spent five years in prison
for conspiracy to commit a crime.
Other attacks were more successful. In 1982
an Israeli army recruit from Baltimore went on
a shooting rampage in the shrine, killing two
and seriously wounding several others. The
Jerusalem waqf, the Islamic foundation that
oversees the acropolis, claims there have been
dozens of attempts by Jewish extremists to
damage or destroy the building.
Etzion now insists that the dome’s demolition
should come only with the agreement of the
waqf, a highly dubious scenario. But his vision
has moved from fringe to mainstream. Jewish
religious and political leaders who in the past
avoided any talk of removing the shrine now
UNDER THE DOME 55
TOP LEFT

Many parts of the

ancient shrine have
been replaced in mod-
ern times. The exterior
tiles date to the 1960s;
the gilded dome, to the
’90s. The gold plating
was at first so blinding
in Jerusalem’s intense
sun it had to be dulled.

TOP RIGHT
Sheikh Omar Kiswani,
the director of the Al
Aqsa complex, marries
a couple (wearing
white) in a ceremony
inside the Dome of
the Rock. “Any church
or synagogue in the
Holy Land is a place of
peace,” he says. “Only
here is it a war zone.”

BOTTOM LEFT

A father and son take

a moment’s rest amid
the dome’s ornate
splendor. Conservators
struggle to maintain
the aging building,
where fixing a leaking
roof or laying new car-
pet can quickly escalate
into a political drama.

BOTTOM RIGHT

Palestinians take
part in a protest on
steps leading up
to the dome, which
has emerged as a
potent symbol of
the Palestinian cause
for independence,
on par with Jewish
attachment to the
nearby Western Wall.

56 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
UNDER THE DOME 57
openly speak about constructing a third Jewish
temple. In the meantime, a growing number
of religious Jews demand the right to pray on
the platform long reserved only for Muslim
worship—an Israeli policy designed to prevent
friction between adherents of the two faiths.
In recent years these Jews have tested the
limits of that restriction, roaming the grounds
in groups protected by Israeli police. A new
right-wing Israeli government includes several
ministers eager to allow Jewish prayer on the
acropolis, heightening tensions.
In April of this year police stormed the Al
Aqsa Mosque twice during Ramadan, smashing
doors and windows, firing rubber bullets, and
injuring 12 people. Police claimed they quelled
58 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
rioters armed with fireworks who had barricaded
themselves in the building, but their actions
were denounced by Arab nations and Muslims
around the world.
Far less media coverage attends another, qui-
eter, crisis. In 2016 Hussein’s son and successor,
King Abdullah II, launched a multimillion-dollar
project to address major problems plaguing the
Dome of the Rock’s interior, including buckling
mosaics, flaking plaster, and rotting wood. Much
of the damage came from the leaky 1960s roof
or seeped into the walls when the 48 original
waterspouts clogged with pigeon dung.
Progress has been slow. Jordanian and Al Aqsa
officials blame Israeli police, who control anyone
and anything entering the gates.

Jewish men peer
down at a section of
the Western Wall, a
remnant of the Jewish
Temple complex razed
by Roman forces in
A.D. 70. Beyond rises
the dome that many
Jews and Christians
believe was built on
the site of the ancient
Jewish Temple.
“They interfere with everything we do!”
exclaims Bassam al Hallaq, head of the site’s
restoration department, as we stand beside the
low wooden rail surrounding the rock. “Every
day I have a problem.” He jabs his finger at an
area where the brown paint has worn off. “I want
to paint this exactly the same color, but I can’t
get permission.”
When Al Hallaq attempted to replace a fallen
tile in 2019, he was handcuffed and held at
a police station for more than six hours. Israeli
police declined to comment on his allegations,
but given hardening relations between Jeru-
salem’s Jews and Muslims, the difficulties of
repairing and maintaining the ancient structure
are likely to worsen.
the
S S U N L I G H T S P I L L S OV E R
Mount of Olives shortly after
dawn, Hanady Halawani meets
me outside one of the acropolis
gates. Small and thin, Halawani
is part of a movement to make
the dome a center for teaching
the Quran to Palestinian women. “We started
with 50 students and seven teachers,” she says.
“Now we have 17 teachers and 650 students—and
that is only the women’s project!” For Halawani,
religious learning and political activism are inter-
twined. “Al Aqsa is a place of worship, and our
presence there protects it from the occupiers.”
Israeli officials, suspicious of her organizing
efforts, have repeatedly banned her from enter-
ing the sacred site, which is why we meet outside
the compound. Halawani claims to have been
arrested 67 times and says she has done 13 stints
in prison, including three in solitary confine-
ment. As we speak, she glances nervously at the
armed Israeli police officers who pass by.
In recent decades the dome has emerged as a
potent “national as well as a religious symbol”
for Palestinians, explains Palestinian philoso-
pher Sari Nusseibeh. In his book-strewn office
north of the Old City, he says the dome retains
its power as a place “where heaven and earth are
tied together.” But he worries that the mixture of
politics and faith on both sides is growing ever
more volatile. “People are getting more religious,”
he says. Meanwhile, political extremists also are
on the rise. “It is a scary future to think about.”
When I return to the compound, two dozen reli-
gious Jews shepherded by armed Israeli police are
circling the perimeter, some bowing and touching
their foreheads in signs of prayer. I remove my
shoes and enter the dome, encountering Fatah
Kayem and his two sons, Ibrahim and Muham-
mad, as they stroll through the peaceful space.
“It is sacred because this is where the Prophet
came,” the 51-year-old accountant tells me. “And
we also say it is at the heart of the capital of the
Palestinian state. We come here to pray that God
removes all injustices.”
As he speaks, two pigeons flutter furiously
in the cavernous space, looking for a way out.
Below, the rock stands as mute witness to a
tumultuous past as well as an uncertain future. j
Writer Andrew Lawler is the author of Under
Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s
Most Contested City. Photojournalist Ziyah Gafić
focuses on Muslim communities around the world.
UNDER THE DOME 59
 Facing south toward
Mecca, Muslim wor-
shippers perform
Friday prayers outside
the Dome of the Rock.
A source of both inspi-
ration and contention,
few places on Earth are
freighted with so much
meaning for so many.
Battered but unbowed,
bald cypresses guard
a central Florida lake-
shore. The storms that
deformed them likely
saved them from the
logger’s saw. Just a
small fraction of North
America’s ancient
cypress forests remain.

63
Victims of hurricanes,
sea-level rise, and
dredging, dead
cypresses line Jackeys
Creek in Leland, North
Carolina. Agriculture
and development
drained millions of
acres of forested
wetlands in the 20th
century, and saltwater
intrusion is taking an
increasing toll.
 David Stahle stands
O N A B R I S K D E C E M B E R DAY,
atop a ladder leaning against a bald cypress
tree as wide as he is tall. Like a woodsy Doctor Tree ring expert David
Who dropped into this southern swamp with a Stahle cores a cypress
sonic screwdriver, Stahle begins slowly boring in South Carolina’s
Congaree National
through time. Park. Bald cypress tree
The first inch takes him back to before the rings provide one of
First World War, the second to the birth of the the strongest climate
records in science,
United States. Within five inches, Stahle, a den- showing wet and dry
drochronologist at the University of Arkansas, years for more than
has reached Columbus’s voyage to the New two millennia.
World. By the time he’s finished extracting the
pencil-thin core, Stahle has enough rings to esti-
mate that the gnarled cypress sprang from its
sodden bed as the first Crusaders were marching
toward Jerusalem about a thousand years ago.
But it’s the half-inch sliver close to the bark, from
around 1900 to 1935, that Stahle points out. The nonprofit
By the end of that period, roughly 90 per- National Geographic
Society, working to
cent of the ancient bald cypresses in the U.S. conserve Earth’s resources,
had been cut, Stahle says. “There’s less than a helped fund this article.
tenth of one percent of the original bottomland
cypress swamp left” in the country. “That’s why
this place is something special.”
T
is an overlooked patch
H I S P L AC E ”
along North Carolina’s Black River that
contains the oldest known trees east of
the Rockies. In fact, the bald cypress is
the fifth oldest known sexually repro-
ducing tree species on the planet. The tree
Stahle has just cored is barely middle-age. One
cypress he discovered here in 2017 dates to at
least 605 B.C., not long after Homer regaled the
Greeks with the adventures of Odysseus. That
makes it over 2,600 years old, and Stahle has
found several others of similar vintage nearby.
The data from their cores and from other bald
cypresses in the Southeast form one of the lon-
gest and most accurate records of soil moisture
in science. Decades-long droughts, as well as wet
periods known as pluvials, are clearly written in
their rings down to the exact year. These include
a drought that may have doomed England’s first
foothold in the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh’s
famous Lost Colony, in 1587, and a second one in
the 16th century that was even worse.
“The 20th century is not representative of
the extremes those trees have endured,” says
Stahle, who has cored ancient trees all over the
world. A 16th-century megadrought “extended
from Mexico to Canada, from the Atlantic to the
GHOST FORESTS 67
Land steward Zach
West wades through
a grove of bald
cypresses in the Nature
Conservancy’s Black
River Preserve in North
Carolina, home to
some of the oldest
trees on Earth.
 SAVING CYPRESSES
Rampant logging, wetland draining, and rising seas
Habitat of bald cypress
(Taxodium distichum)
Ancient bald cypress stand with
trees more than 500 years old
have reduced once mighty bald cypress stands to a DEL.
Remaining ideal habitat
fraction of what they were centuries ago. Scientists are
working to restore lost habitat and locate and protect MD.
Historic forested wetlands
old-growth trees; some have survived over 2,000 years.

o VIRGINIA
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NORTH CAROLINA

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Home to a bald cypress

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TENNESSEE dating from 605 B.C.

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New Orleans 100 mi

Delta restoration
Houston Conservationists have planted 100 km
more than 90,000 cypresses in
FLORIDA
southern Louisiana since 2010,
in part to restore the region’s
natural hurricane buffers.

Gulf of
CORKSCREW SWAMP
Mexico SANCTUARY
Miami

SHRINKING Long- and short-term inundations of saline water, more

frequent with sea-level rise, can cause freshwater forests

FORESTS to recede. The result: less shelter for animals, and ghost
forests slowly turning to marshland.

Dying trees lose limbs

and branches; bark peels
away from dead trunks.

Bald
cypress

F R E S H W AT E R W E T L A N D GHOST FOREST S A LT M A R S H
Less than 0.5 ppt* 2 or more ppt 18 to 35 ppt
Comparable to soft drinks Comparable to canned soups Comparable to seawater
Bald cypresses create sturdy Trees try to resist decay but begin Trunks remain in various states
networks of roots that stabilize to die off as salinity rises. Skeletal of decay or have fallen; a salt
trees within freshwater habitats. trunks dominate the landscape. marsh has taken hold.

*PARTS PER THOUSAND SALT CONCENTRATION ROSEMARY WARDLEY AND LUCAS PETRIN, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: DAVID W. STAHLE, UNIVERSITY
OF ARKANSAS; WILLIAM H. CONNER, CLEMSON UNIVERSITY; LANDFIRE, USGS, AND USDA
Pacific, and lasted almost 40 years. We haven’t
seen anything like that in the modern era.”
While these ancient trees provide a window
on our climate past, their siblings closer to the
coast are teaching us an equally important
lesson about our climate future. Even though
bald cypresses are among the most resilient
trees on Earth—able to withstand some of
the worst conditions nature can muster—
cypress forests are now dying in droves along
the coastline from Delaware to Texas, leaving
bone white skeletons in their wake.
T
HESE GHOST FORESTS are perhaps the
clearest signal we have of the inexora-
ble rising tide that is pushing salt water
deep into once freshwater ecosystems.
Although bald cypresses are more salt
tolerant than the ashes, oaks, and other species
that share their forested wetland home, they can’t
survive long with more than two parts per thou-
sand (ppt) salt in their water. The Atlantic Ocean
can exceed 35 ppt, and the level of the ocean is
rising faster along the eastern seaboard than
almost anywhere else on the planet. Sea level
in nearby Wilmington, North Carolina’s largest
port, has risen about 12 inches since 1950 and is
projected to rise at least another foot by 2050.
The Black River trees aren’t currently threatened
by salt water; the river remains a quintessential
blackwater stream. But farther downstream in
the Lower Cape Fear watershed, at least 800
acres of forested wetland have turned into salt
marsh since the 1950s as the water has become
more brackish, according to recent research
from the University of North Carolina at Wil-
mington. Once annual average salinity hits the
2 ppt mark, the conversion from forest to marsh
becomes inevitable.
Cape Fear’s ghost forests, which can be seen
from area bridges, are a microcosm of a much
larger trend. A recent study by researchers at
the University of Virginia and Duke University
using satellite imagery found that the Gulf Coast
and Atlantic coastal plain lost more than 5,000
square miles, or 8 percent, of forested coastal
wetlands between 1996 and 2016. That’s a Con-
necticut-size swath of forest that is now mostly
salt marsh and scrub. And almost 270 square
miles continue to disappear each year—more
than triple the loss rate of global mangroves,
long considered one of the most threatened
A core from a Black River cypress reveals thick and
thin rings that correlate precisely with wet and dry
periods over centuries. The three holes on the far
right mark the ring that corresponds to A.D. 500.
MARK THIESSEN
ecosystems on Earth. The researchers concluded
that at that pace, barring widespread protection
or restoration efforts, we could lose all our coastal
forested wetlands before the century’s end.
B
were North
A L D C Y P R E S S S WA M P S
America’s Amazon 120 years ago, cov-
ering an estimated 40 million acres of
the serpentine forested wetlands of the
South. They were home to magnificent
ivory-billed woodpeckers, delicate Bachman’s
warblers, and swarms of Carolina parakeets, not
to mention a plethora of aquatic species. But
protecting swamps has long been a hard sell. In
fact, they are perhaps the only ecosystem that
has been specifically targeted for destruction by
the federal government.
The Swamp Land Act of 1850, and another like
it, gave unclaimed federal wetlands to several
southern states, requiring that the proceeds from
land sales be used to drain them. None other
than the great orator Daniel Webster summed up
the general sentiment in 1851: “[N]othing beau-
tiful or useful grows in it; the traveler through it
breathes miasma, and treads among all things
unwholesome and loathsome.”
Unlike their close cousins the redwoods and
giant sequoias, cypresses had no organization
like the Save the Redwoods League to lobby for
their protection. No Ansel Adams–worthy vistas
GHOST FORESTS 71
The bald cypress is
the fifth oldest known
sexually reproducing
tree species on Earth.
This specimen on the
Black River is not the
tallest or prettiest,
but it dates to at least
605 B.C. Stahle believes
that even older trees
exist along the quiet
blackwater stream,
making it worthy of
federal protection.
USING A DRONE TO CAPTURE
THE LENGTH OF THE TREE, MAC
STONE CREATED A COMPOSITE
OF 12 IMAGES.
 A Florida black bear
finds a scratching post
in the National Audu-
bon Society’s Corkscrew
Swamp Sanctuary,
one of the last virgin
cypress forests left in
the United States.
Created in 1954, the
refuge was among
the first where the
importance of cypress
swamps as wildlife hab-
itat was recognized.

TOP BOTTOM

Scientists thought Researchers don’t know

the giant sphinx moth exactly why cypresses
was the sole pollina- grow their famous
tor of the rare ghost “knees,” woody struc-
orchid, until other tures at their bases.
moths were caught in But this one provides
the act by camera traps a perch for a common
in Corkscrew Swamp snapping turtle in Flori-
Sanctuary in Florida. da’s Suwannee River.

‘ THAT’S THE THING
ABOUT OLD TREES.
SPECIES THAT
HAVE BEEN WITH US
A LONG TIME HAVE
TO ADAPT.’
—JULIE MOORE , BIOLOGIST
to show the nation what was at stake. As soon as
loggers developed cable logging, steam-powered
skidders, and other technologies that enabled
them to reach deep into the swamps, they set
upon them like beavers, turning acres of old-
growth cypresses into siding, shingles, even
banana crates, until only the most isolated pock-
ets of the ancient trees remained. The Carolina
parakeets, ivory bills, and Bachman’s warblers
eventually vanished as well.
O
N A COOL,clear autumn day with no
miasma in sight, National Geographic
Explorer Mac Stone, Stahle, and local
guide Charles Robbins launch their
kayaks into the Black River’s labyrinth
of channels, flowing with water the color of fine
bourbon. Their goal is to visit the 2,000-year-old
trees Stahle discovered in 2017, and to find and
core three more denizens that Stone had spot-
ted during an aerial survey of the area, known
locally as the Three Sisters Swamp. The stillness
of the swamp is palpable, broken only by paddle
drips and the heart-stopping flush of brightly
colored wood ducks. Without Robbins’s local
knowledge, getting lost would be almost instan-
taneous. Robbins has lived in Wilmington since
the 1980s and has seen the ghost forests creeping
up the Cape Fear River, hammered by a trifecta
of sea-level rise, dredging of the ship channel,
and frequent hurricanes.
“They all got beat to hell during Bertha and
78 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Fran,” Robbins says, referring to the two hur-
ricanes that scored direct hits on the Cape
Fear region in 1996, causing major flooding
and billions of dollars in damages. “Many tops
were broken off, and they were coated with salt
spray. They just started to decline.” The water
around the Three Sisters is not salty, he says, but
it gets hit from heavy nutrient loads upstream in
Sampson and Duplin Counties, which have the
highest density of hogs in the nation and untold
numbers of chicken and turkey farms. Nearly all
the waste from millions of hogs, chickens, and
turkeys is spread on fields.
Mature cypress forests are incredibly good at
cleaning up water—some have even been used
to treat municipal sewage in Louisiana. But such
high levels of nutrients invite alligator weed, an
exotic species, to settle in, and it can outcompete
young cypress seedlings.
E
N ROUTE TO Stone’s trees, the boats
are eventually blocked by a phalanx
of cypress knees, some more than
10 feet tall, so the group abandons the
kayaks and sloshes through the boot-
sucking muck to the rough GPS location
on Stone’s map. One key to the oldest trees’
survival, Stahle believes, is that they have a cer-
tain “gnarl factor” that makes them worthless
as lumber. The trees they find are no exception.
They sport massively swollen and fluted bases
festooned with burls the size of kitchen tables.
The first tree’s top is split and ragged, torn off
by some punishing storm and then regrown
willy-nilly. The second has a trunk that divides
into two 50 feet up, then spirals together like
giant flamingos. The last has a hollow that once
housed a black bear big enough to scrape its
mark seven feet off the ground. (Eastern North
Carolina has some of the largest black bears
in the world.) Though he can’t core the hol-
low tree, Stahle estimates it is likely as old as
the other two, which have lived at least a thou-
sand years.
“That’s the thing about old trees,” says Julie
Moore, a retired biologist from the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, who pointed Stahle to the Black
River in the early 1980s when she worked for the
North Carolina Natural Heritage Program. “They
wouldn’t have lived this long if they couldn’t
take it. Species that have been with us a long
time have to adapt.”
A flathead catfish
hovers above a nest of
eggs even as the Black
River recedes around
it. Bald cypresses—and
their fellow swamp
species—are resistant
to floods and droughts.
Aside from catfish, the
river contains some
30 rare, endangered,
or threatened spe-
cies, many perfectly
adapted to these
extreme conditions.
Skeletal cypresses
stalk a saltwater marsh
that is creeping up the
Sampit River in South
Carolina, a growing
trend along the East
Coast as seas rise.
Scientists say the U.S.
could lose all of its
coastal forested
wetlands by 2100.
In a sign of a changing
world, black-bellied
whistling ducks,
common to Central
America, are moving
north into Corkscrew
Swamp Sanctuary,
nesting in old cypress
trees that may have
been used by ivory-
billed woodpeckers
and Carolina parakeets.
An American alligator
basks in solitude amid
tupelos and ancient
cypresses in Audubon’s
Francis Beidler Forest
in South Carolina. From
providing refuge for
rare species to aiding
in flood and pollution
control in watersheds,
swamps once seen
as wastelands are now
national treasures.

Many of those adaptations could prove
invaluable to humans in a hotter, drier, and
stormier world. One study found that even
young cypress trees can withstand months of
flooding more than 30 feet deep, while their
trunks, their knees, and the swampy soils
around their roots absorb stormwater and car-
bon like a sponge. Stahle has shown they can
survive decades-long droughts, and others
have determined that cypresses can contribute
to groundwater recharge and even filter some
contaminants. Their high salt tolerance often
makes them the last of the ghost forest trees
to go. But it’s an uncanny ability to survive the
most powerful storms on the planet that makes
them truly unique.
W
ILLIAM CONNER interviewed for a
research job at Clemson Univer-
sity’s Belle W. Baruch Institute of
Coastal Ecology and Forest Science
in Georgetown, South Carolina, two
weeks after Hurricane Hugo blasted the state in
1989. The Category 4 storm came ashore with
winds of nearly 140 miles an hour, damaging
some 4.4 million acres of forest and destroying 6.7
billion board feet of sawtimber—enough to build
about 660,000 homes. That would have housed
almost the entire state of West Virginia at the time.
“When I drove through Francis Marion National
Forest, all the pines were flattened to the ground,”
says Conner, now professor emeritus at the insti-
tute. “All the cypress along the streams were still

84 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

standing. They are incredibly wind-fast, with their
buttresses and knees and intertwined root sys-
tems. I’ve only seen two trees blown over in my
career, and both were isolated by themselves.”
That makes them particularly good for resto-
ration projects in places like Louisiana, which
once may have had the greatest cypress forests on
the continent. Hurricane Katrina was able to flood
80 percent of greater New Orleans in no small part
because the city was built on old cypress swamps
that were logged and drained, and it eventually
sank many feet below sea level. But with several
freshwater diversions now in place and the closing
of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet shipping chan-
nel, which was a direct conduit for salt water from
the Gulf of Mexico into the Lake Pontchartrain
Basin, conservation groups have been steadily
planting cypresses to restore the region’s lost
hurricane buffers, among other benefits.
The Pontchartrain Conservancy has planted
about 92,000 trees since 2010. “We’ve been get-
ting anywhere from 65 to 98 percent survival rate
depending on the site,” says Michael Hopkins,
who runs the conservancy’s planting program.
“Some of the trees are now 30 to 40 feet tall. When
they become mature adults, they can be there for
centuries, as long as there is enough fresh water.”
A
on the Black
S T H E S H A D OW S L E N G T H E N
River, Stahle, Robbins, and Stone paddle
back toward the Three Sisters grove to
set up camp on a sandbar where a copse
of ancient cypresses blots out the stars.
After Stahle found the first Roman-era trees in
the mid-’80s, the Nature Conservancy began
buying land and conservation easements around
the grove. It now owns some 17,000 acres along the
Black, including the area around the oldest trees.
Stahle doesn’t think that’s enough. A proposal to
create a Black River state park fizzled in 2017 after
some local residents expressed concern about the
effects an influx of visitors might have on the old
trees—and the quiet, rural community—even
though a statewide survey conducted that year
found strong support for state protection.
“They are at two meters of elevation, near the
coast, so they are threatened [by sea-level rise],”
Stahle says. “At that level we’ll be losing cities,
and we can’t allow that to happen. But even the
small remnant old-growth forests can be the core
area of a broader plan of ecosystem restoration.
I’d like to see it protected as a national preserve
or monument.” He cites the creation of South
Carolina’s Congaree National Park as an example.
One of Earth’s oldest trees stands a hundred
feet away, as it has throughout the ravages of the
past 2,600 years. Its busted top is sprinkled with
resurrection ferns, so named, Stahle says, because
they can lose nearly all the water in their tissues
during drought, turn gray as death, then spring
back to life, good as new, at the first rain. They
seem a fitting accessory for this ancient member
of a species long known as “the wood everlast-
ing,” which with care and conservation could
help us adapt to a warmer, stormier world. j
Joel K. Bourne, Jr., a regular contributor to
National Geographic, is an award-winning writer
on global environmental issues.
GHOST FORESTS 85
The Leones Glacier
in Chilean Patagonia
belongs to one of the
world’s largest ice
fields. But expanding
lakes and the crack
and boom of calving
ice are evidence of the
glaciers’ accelerating
diminishment.
Travelers to Chile’s ice fields discover that the majestic silence
of the glaciers is increasingly shattered by the din of loss.

BY RO B E RT D RA P E R

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y TA M A R A M E R I N O

87
An inflatable Zodiac
takes visitors through
a lagoon strewn
with “bergy bits”
and “growlers”—
pieces smaller than
an iceberg—to get a
closer look at the San
Rafael Glacier.
 ‘I
AM
THE
GUARDIAN
OF
THE
GLACIER,’
says Andrea Carretta. He does not mean this as
a boast but rather a simple acknowledgment
of service. The 46-year-old park ranger slowly
lowers himself until he is on one knee. In quiet
tones he asks the glacier for permission to lead
us onto the secluded ice.
We’re at the approach to the Exploradores
Glacier, situated in southern Chile’s Laguna
San Rafael National Park. It’s early September,
a season of less rain and fewer tourists. Swol-
len gray clouds loom over us as the dense forest
recedes. We strap crampons onto our hiking
boots and crunch our way through a terrain of
slick morainal sediment that suddenly cascades
into a swirling panorama of pale blue ice massifs
and minty glacial waterways. The primordial
might of Exploradores must be respected, even
90 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
by someone like Carretta who visits the glacier
on foot daily, often spending evenings at its
edge in a firelit cabin bedroom where he dines
on canned food. As a new visitor, I find the gla-
cier beautiful but also terrifying, as with any
indomitable force.
It’s a bit jolting, then, to hear Carretta say,
“The glacier is dying.” The words are both ten-
der and factual. Born in the Italian Alps, an
accomplished but wayward mountain climber,
Carretta found his paradise in Patagonia in 2016.
He relocated to Chile with his wife and son,
who accept how his heart is divided. “I know
the glacier loves me,” he says.
Today it is his lot to measure with sensors
the steady recession of the glacier, about a yard
every year. It’s there for Carretta to see. Where

there was ice, now there are ponds. There is no
mystery here. The melting of Patagonia’s glaciers
coincides with rising temperatures that, in turn,
correlate with the past half century’s accelera-
tion of carbon emissions.
“The tourists who come here for a beautiful
photo, I say to them, ‘Take your photo, and then
come back in five years and take another, so that
you can see the difference the way I see it,’ ” he
says. “Maybe there’s hope. Or maybe the Earth
will just punish us.”
as Chilean Patagonia is,
A S WO R L D - FA M O U S
though, its extravagance lies in its lack of polish.
Here nature—hushed, magisterial—is luxury
enough. The region’s 775-mile north-south
byway, the Carretera Austral, winds through
The massive Grey
Glacier in Torres del
Paine National Park
looms over passengers
on a tourist boat. This
natural wonder, part
of the Southern Pata-
gonian Ice Field, stands
three and a half miles
wide and 10 stories tall.
the snow-draped Andean mountain chain and
pastures, betraying only the vaguest evidence
of human habitation, such as the odd cowboy
on horseback flanked by his tribe of cattle dogs.
With the exception of urban Coyhaique, the
towns of Chilean Patagonia do not stray from
the territory’s rough-hewn ethos. Its people are
synchronized with the land rather than with
greater civilization. The common adage here is,
“He who rushes in Patagonia loses time.”
Patagonia’s approximately 17,300 glaciers,
strewn across Argentina and Chile’s Southern
and Northern Ice Fields, symbolize the region
above all else. Relics of an ice sheet that peaked
in size some 28,000 years ago, they constitute
the establishing shot for the region’s seeming
immutability. And, like the rest of Patagonia, the
THE SOUND OF ICE 91
Grey Glacier feeds
into the south end of
Grey Lake. Trekkers
hike up to the ice on
routes such as the
popular W or O circuits,
or use crampons to
walk on the glacier.
A blue way-finding
tool guides hikers
along the 11-mile-long
Exploradores Glacier
in Laguna San Rafael
National Park, in Chile’s
less visited Northern
Patagonian Ice Field.
MASSIVE MELTDOWN Teresa

l f
The Northern Patagonian Ice Field—the third Melting

u
largest ice mass in the Southern Hemisphere— glaciers often

G
LAGUNA SAN E
leave behind lakes
totals 1,600 square miles and is almost a mile

xp
s
RAFAEL N.P.

lora
t e
deep in parts. This dramatic landscape is

do
not only shrinking in area: It’s also losing Mormex

a n

re
0.04 B s
more than 1.4 cubic miles in volume a year, Circo

e f
0.09 B
enough to cover Rhode Island in nearly

E l
Reicher Grosse
five feet of ice. This melting can lead to 2.98 B 2.71 B
dangerous floods; glacial lakes have
Gualas Exploradores
burst from their banks, inundating E NL 1.79 B
7.75 B
nearby communities. A RG
ED AT R Cerro San Valentín
IGHT 13,314 ft Bayo
4,058 m 0.53 B

F I E L D
Laguna
San Rafael Fiero 2.17 B
SOUTH
AMERICA Mocho
0.12 B
O

q
f

FIC ui Cristal
CI
E

Is San Rafael Glacier

PA
CHIL

th 34.98 billion cubic feet 0.11 B

I C E
EAN mu of ice lost each year (B)
OC s
Leones
Northern Patagonia 0.32 B Leones
Patagonian
San Lake
Ice Field
Quintín Hyades

N
30.11 B 0.03 B
ANTARCTICA Soler

N I A
Andree 0.26 B 1.41 B

San Strindberg
Average annual ice 0.73 B

G O
Esteban
loss since 2000 Gulf Fraenkel
25 billion cubic feet (B) 0.94 B T A
5 billion
Benito Cachet Nef
11.37 B 6.34 B
P A

Norte
1 billion 0.2 B

One billion cubic feet is Cachet

enough to cover
R N

0.63 B
Manhattan in 1.5 feet of ice HPN 1
19.06 B
H E

Glacier area loss Colonia

since 2000 13.28 B
R T
O

5 mi
Cerro Arenales
N

5 km 11,276 ft
3,437 m
Acodado
23.6 B Arco
0.47 B

WORLDWIDE LOSSES
Rapid melting isn’t unique to the Steffen
36.75 B Pared Norte
Northern Ice Field. It’s happening 6.34 B
HPN 4
at an equally alarming pace all over 4.34 B
the southern Andes, where the Pared Sur 2.15 B
rate of melting has surpassed Piscis 0.41 B
the global average for decades.

Greatest annual rates Steffen

of glacier loss by region, 2000–2019
L Lake
NA SAN RAFAE 7,152 ft
LAGU TIONAL PARK
(in pounds per square foot) 2,180 m
NA
Iceland 211
Central Europe 209
Alaska 186
New Zealand 174 d
r

.P.
Fjo

N
Southern Andes 172 EL
FA
Steffen

A
Global average 94 lb/sq. ft. NR
SA
A
GUN
LA
SOREN WALLJASPER, NGM STAFF
e r
SOURCES: INÈS DUSSAILLANT, ETHAN WELTY, AND SAMUEL NUSSBAUMER, WORLD GLACIER Tortel Bak
MONITORING SERVICE; JORGE O’KUINGHTTONS, MINISTRY OF PUBLIC WORKS OF CHILE; ESRI; SRTM
 A ust
r al
Hig
hw
ay

Bahía Murta

Puerto Sánchez
LA
GU ke
N Puerto Río La
A Tranquilo ra
SA r re
NR
AFA EL N.P. Ca
al
er
n
e
G

This aerial image of

the San Rafael Glacier
taken in the Chilean
N summer of 1945 shows
the extent of the ice
on what is now a gla-
S a n R a
n a f a cial lake. The photo is
g u 1 glacier limit
e
l part of the glaciologi-
L
a 187 cal monitoring archives
that date from 1894.
1905
INSTITUTO GEOGRÁFICO MILITAR

192
0
glaciers reward inspection. Each undulating ice
sculpture is different from the other. But like all
glaciers, their growth or decline is reliant on the
1945
amount of snow they receive and the tempera-
74
19 tures that either keep them frozen or speed their
thawing and calving.
198 Key to appreciating their character is recog-
3

nizing their vulnerability. “It’s like nature’s

92 1 sq mile
19 thermometer,” says Jorge O’Kuinghttons Villena,
2001 1 sq km the Chilean government’s chief glaciologist in the
0 18 Patagonian region. “When you see it recede, you
2

2023 limit know that human lives nearby are at risk.”

San
Rafael
Glacier
ICY PAST, WATERY FUTURE
Scientists are using historical photographs
to measure the retreat of the San Rafael
Glacier (its “tongue” is shown above and in
the photo). The edge lies nearly six miles
back from where it did in 1871—over the
decades steadily melting into a nearby lake.
O’Kuinghttons is referring to the fact that melt-
4,891 ft
1,491 m ing ice can result in glacial lake outburst floods,
or GLOFs, that can swiftly overtake a nearby
community. A striking case of this occurred in
1977, at Bahía Murta, a rural town on the shore
of General Carrera Lake that was engulfed by
surging glacial flows.
“Many people were taken by surprise, because
it was a sunny day with no rain,” recalls Clotilda
Yanez Avilles, whose family had already relo-
cated with other townspeople after scientists
warned of the ominous rise of the two rivers

THE SOUND OF ICE 97

Exploradores
descends from
Mount San Valentín,
the highest peak
in Chilean Patagonia,
at 13,313 feet. As a
glacier moves, it carries
and deposits an accu-
mulation of debris
known as a moraine.
surrounding Bahía Murta. “Some people didn’t
want to abandon their homes and had to be
rescued by boat.”
I ask O’Kuinghttons if the GLOF that destroyed
Bahía Murta was a once-in-a-lifetime occur-
rence. “No, that was an extreme event,” he
replies. “And those will happen more frequently
in Patagonia, and with more violent intensity.”
One early morning, we drive southward from
the ramshackle town of Puerto Río Tranquilo,
veering off onto a bumpy dirt road astride
the Leones River and moving through private
forestland until we arrive at an unpaved park-
ing area.
Our guides, Pascual and Anita Diaz, married
and in their 50s, then lead us on a three-hour
hike to the Leones Glacier. Sloshing across
streams, weaving through forestland that
had been thinned out by a GLOF two decades
earlier, scaling a precarious wooden cliffside
ladder, and then navigating an even more pre-
carious wooden footbridge, we at last make
100 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
our way across a rocky plain that dwindles
into a morainal shoreline of a vast glacial lake.
A lone boat, owned by the Diazes, sits lashed
to the boulders. We skim across the still surface
of Leones Lake for its entire six-mile length,
until we dead-end at the foot of the glacier at
the eastern edge of the Northern Patagonian
Ice Field.
Owing to the remoteness of Leones Glacier,
only a few hundred tourists visit it each year, a
tiny fraction of the traffic seen at Exploradores.
Leones’s facade is like that of a frostbitten old
man: unkempt, scarred, and hued with a life-
time’s complexities. For a full hour, I contemplate
it. Floating on the otherwise empty lake—and
then later, picnicking on the boulder slabs of the
glacier itself—I experience an almost monastic
sensation. No life, no movement, no change of
any sort, other than the slow ebbing of sunlight
that by late afternoon casts the landscape in a
daguerreotype luster. Every 10 minutes or so, the
deep silence gives way to a sound akin to gunfire:
Uberlinda Fuentes Their window frames “All I can do is show what is happening,”
and Efrain Huelet a view of Steffen Lake. he laments.
have lived at the foot With rising tempera-
of Steffen Glacier for tures, GLOFs caused by
more than 50 years. melting ice are becom- MY INTERPRETER AND I CONTINUE on the Car-
Their home is vulner- ing more frequent, retera Austral in the direction of the southern
able to GLOFs, glacial making life precarious
lake outburst floods. for lakeside villages. Andes, with the lavishly frothing Baker River
to our right and amply fed cattle preening all
around. We pull into a large parking lot haloed
the cracking of ice, the concussion as the glacier’s by food stores and tourist booths. Then we
weighty particles crash into the water. Just as descend on foot along a labyrinthine succession
suddenly, silence returns. of wooden stairs and boardwalks into Tortel, a
This is a casual, everyday occurrence, says 68-year-old village on stilts.
Pascual Diaz. What alarms him, he adds, is that Some 500 residents dwell in cabins suspended
the glacier’s slow but steady recession over the by wooden beams over an outflow to the Pacific
past two decades has begun to accelerate. Ocean, representing a kind of apogee in the prac-
“In these last five years,” he says, “I can see tice of living dangerously in Chilean Patagonia.
the changes very easily.” Gesturing to the other Sandwiched between the Southern Ice Field and
side of the lake, Diaz cites the brownish morainal the San Rafael Glacier at the mouth of the Baker
sediment as all that remains of a glacial surface River, Tortel feels very much like civilization’s
from just a couple of years ago. Like Andrea Car- terminus. There are no cars. Electricity is spo-
retta at Exploradores, Diaz regards Leones with radic; firewood is the village’s main source of
palpable helplessness. heating. But for the many young people whose

THE SOUND OF ICE 101

At the glaciological
station on San Rafael,
Jorge O’Kuinghttons
Villena attends to
instruments that
gather and transmit
real-time data on
weather conditions,
air temperature, wind
speed, relative humid-
ity, and solar radiation
to identify ice levels.
Water still cascades
from the top of what
photographer Tamara
Merino estimates to
be a three- to six-foot-
tall bergy bit recently
calved from San Rafael.
As a result of its steep
slope, San Rafael is
the most actively
calving glacier in the
Northern Ice Field.
A visitor enjoys a day
cruise to Grey, one of
the most popular and
accessible glaciers in
Chile. Tourist guides
and climate scientists
say sustainable tourism
supports local com-
munities and inspires
travelers to learn more
about glaciers and
how to protect them.

wanderlust has led them from urban malaise to
the rugged tranquility of the glacial outback, liv-
ing at the brink of the icy wilderness is the point.
“The reason I decided to relocate here from
Santiago,” says 26-year-old Freddy Fernandez
Cardenas, a former physical education instructor
who now operates one of Tortel’s two water
taxi services, “is that here, when I close my
eyes and then open them, what I see are moun-
tains and water.”
In a blue house on a steep, tree-shrouded hill I
meet one of Tortel’s first inhabitants, 84-year-old
Juanita Vidal Menco, among whose 13 offspring
is the village’s mayor. “There was nothing here,”
she says, recalling when she arrived at the age
of 10 with her family on horseback from the
larger, snowier town of Cochrane, due north.
They and other cattle-raising families lived in
tents while chopping down trees to construct
Tortel’s boardwalks. At the age of 16, after Tor-
tel’s first houses were built, she married a man
10 years her senior who was already imagining
new frontiers. “He thought it would be better
to raise cattle on the prairie near the San Rafael
Glacier,” she says. “So we built a house and lived
there for several years.” Fondly, the old woman
adds, “We lived like animals, with no concept of
time or memory.”
The couple eventually moved back to Tor-
tel to raise their family, a decision that would
prove wise, as rising temperatures would lead
to the glacier’s retreat and, with it, the flooding
of nearby lakes and rivers. In April of 2008, a
GLOF—the first of what would be seven in the
Baker River Delta over a two-year period—
engulfed the entire area.
The village was spared, but one look at Tortel’s
rickety positioning is all it takes to recognize its

106 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 WHAT TO KNOW:
CHILEAN GLACIERS
By Erick Pinedo

in Chilean Patagonia generates

G L AC I E R T O U R I S M
significant economic benefits, but the glaciers’
notable withdrawal requires travelers to be aware
when venturing into these icy realms. Chile has two
major continental ice sheets: the Northern Patago-
nian Ice Field (1,620 square miles) and the Southern
Patagonian Ice Field (5,020 square miles).
In general, glacier expeditions are of medium-
high difficulty, since they can present uneven, unsta-
ble terrain, including ice formations, caverns, and
crevasses. They require visitors to be in good physi-
cal condition. When choosing an outfitter for glacier
trekking, consider reputation, safety measures,
certifications, and environmental responsibility.
“We take people, from children to the elderly,
to see the impact of climate change firsthand,”
says Pedro Soto, a guide for Turismo Valle Leones.
“Near my village, the Exploradores Glacier is going
through a rapid transformation process that will
cause changes in a few years; it’s probable that,
before long, we’ll have to sail to reach its base.”

Southern Ice Field: Northern Ice Field:

home to renowned
glaciers such as
O’Higgins and Pío XI,
in Bernardo O’Higgins
National Park, as well
as Tyndall and Grey,
in Torres del Paine
National Park. These
sites are easily acces-
sible from the city
of Puerto Natales.
ongoing state of peril. “Being so near the glacial Infrastructure around
Torres del Paine, which
activity,” says O’Kuinghttons, “puts Tortel in real received close to
danger, right now.” 105,500 tourists in 2022,
For travelers, it is a sobering notion to seek is more developed, with
more accommodation
out nature’s undying primacy, only to discover options, guide services,
that even its mightiest exemplars are mortal in and activities.
their own way.
OUTFITTERS
Months after my time in Chilean Patagonia, Bigfoot Patagonia
I would find myself lying in the comfort of my specializes in trekking
bed and thinking about the night I spent in a and mountaineering
on Grey (bigfootpata
tent on the shore of Leones Lake, listening to gonia.com).
the faint popping from the campfire and the Antares Patagonia
incantation of a distant glacial waterfall. Then, offers trekking on the
glacier and kayaking
piercing the semihushed soundtrack, would on Grey Lake (antares
come the unmistakable sound of fracturing patagonia.com).
ice, followed by the detonation of the lake’s
surface—and after that, the near-stillness. The
Robert Draper has been a frequent contributor
cycle would then resume. I fell asleep to it. to National Geographic since 2007 and is a staff
Now, it keeps me awake. j writer for the New York Times.
smaller and less
accessible than its
counterpart but has
notable glaciers such
as Exploradores and
San Rafael. Its remote
location in Laguna
San Rafael National
Park—which receives
just over 3,000 visitors
a year and is reached
after a three-hour drive
from Coyhaique or the
small border town of
Balmaceda—makes this
place a distinct site for
expedition tourism.
OUTFITTERS
Turismo Valle Leones
organizes expeditions
and treks to Explo-
radores and around
Laguna San Rafael Park
(valleleones.cl).
Swoop Patagonia
focuses on guided
ice-trekking adven-
tures on Leones
and Nef Glaciers
(swoop-patagonia.com).

THE SOUND OF ICE 107

In Niassa Special
Reserve, Jabru Suedi
flushes fish out from
rocky hiding places in
the Lugenda River into
his handheld net. He
can grip up to three
fish between his teeth
to guard the catch
against opportunistic
birds of prey, such as
yellow-billed kites.
 To help protect
its largest
wildlife preserve,
Mozambique is
giving local
people a stake
in its success.

An
Exceptional
Wilderness
BY LEONIE JOUBERT PHOTOGRAPHS BY THOMAS PESCHAK

109
Niassa’s elephants
suffered calamitous
losses in the 2010s,
when criminal syndi-
cates targeted East
Africa’s largest herds
for their ivory. Ele-
phants here have been
recovering slowly
since 2018, although
few big tuskers remain.
Niassa upends the
myth of Africa’s pro-
tected areas as Edens
untouched by human
presence. For thou-
sands of years people
here have gathered
food from the land
and coexisted with
wildlife. They weren’t
displaced when the
reserve was created,
and some now help
maintain this conserva-
tion wilderness, with
its braided rivers and
jutting inselbergs.
 The nonprofit
National Geographic
Society, working to
conserve Earth’s resources,
helped fund this article.

114 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 on a sandbar
J OA N A L I C O N D E S TA N D S
at the Chemambo sacred pools, her
emerald dress drenched and raining
water droplets at her feet. She faces
the altar, a young baobab tree whose
hallowed girth is swaddled in white fab-
ric, and leads fellow pilgrims in prayer.
When the worshippers splashed in the
spring waters moments earlier, they
effervesced like children. Now they’re
quietly reverential. The drumbeat of
their dancing feet has fallen still as they
stand in devotion. The musical rattles
are respectfully quiet as the retiring sun
delivers the group into an evening of
more dancing, singing, and prayer.
The worshippers are taking part in a
chonde-chonde ceremony in Niassa,
a protected area in northern Mozam-
bique, where they lay offerings of food
and money at the base of the baobab
and call on their ancestors, chanting
chonde (please), for happiness, health,
and abundance. Baobabs are sacred—
antechambers to the numinous, where
people gather to invoke the spirits of
their forebears. Lore protects these
trees from the feller’s axe.
Liconde is a traditional healer. She
asks for her practice to be blessed
with prosperity; she also intercedes
At the Chemambo holy on behalf of others in Mbamba, a vil-
site, a baboon nurses
her baby among Yao lage of about 2,000 Yao speakers on
pilgrims who believe the Lugenda River. Only a few have
the troop here embod- made the two-day walk to this holy
ies their ancestors.
Elsewhere in Niassa, place where people have worshipped
people have running for as long as memory. The Yao, like
battles with crop- the other ethnic groups living in the
raiding baboons, but
this troop is treated reserve—including the Macua, Ngoni,
with reverence. Matambwe, and Makonde—have a

A N E XC E P T I O N A L W I L D E R N E S S 115
Sharing the Land
Established in 1954, Niassa Special Reserve is Mozambique’s
largest protected area—covering 16,300 square miles of
L a k e
savanna and woodland, habitat for hundreds of species.
More than 60,000 people live in villages throughout the N y a s a
reserve, where programs designed to build a sustainable
M A L AW I
conservation economy are growing.

TANZANIA
D.R.C. MAP AREA AT RIGHT
Likoma I.
Lake (MALAWI)
Nyasa
MA
Niassa
Special

LA
ZAMBIA
Reserve

WI
AFRICA
MOZAMBIQUE
AREA ZIMBABWE
ENLARGED INDIAN
OCEAN
MOZAMBIQUE BOTS.
SOUTH Protected
area
AFRICA
200 mi
ESWATINI Maputo 200 km

culture that glimmers with an animist connec-
tion with nature even as they’ve blended Islam
into their spirituality.
The spirits of their ancestors endure here in the
form of baboons, ambling on all fours among the
pilgrims. One or two baboons pick peanut offer-
ings from the sand with leathery fingers. Others
squat contemplatively on sun-toasted rocks.
Shrieking adolescents scamper after each other.
“When people die, they often enter the body of
other creatures, like snakes or lions or elephants,”
Liconde says.
Away from this outdoor temple, baboons
have no special significance for the Yao, who
often have running battles with crop-raiding
troops. But these particular baboons are dif-
ferent. Legend has it that long ago, in a time
before Liconde’s “grandparents’ grandparents,”
Mambo, a Yao chief, and his family died after
throwing themselves into the pools following a
village conflict. Their souls entered the baboons,
which today command respect and nourish-
ment, so people give them food offerings of
peanuts and dried corn.
“If we don’t, the spirits will go hungry,” Liconde
explains. “This has been passed down and
remains the tradition.”
Hunter-gatherers, farmers, rulers of chief-
doms—people have called this region home for
thousands of years. But centuries of colonization
and a recent civil war have left communities in
Niassa desperately poor. If this magnificent wil-
derness—ancestral lands of people who have
lived here for generations—is to be preserved
and nurtured for the future, they must be given a
direct stake in conservation efforts and tourism.
Switzerland at
A RG E R T H A N
L 16,300 square miles, Niassa
was established in 1954 as a
hunting reserve and made
a national protected area
in 1999. It’s one of the big-
gest African wildernesses the world has never
heard of, time-capsuled by remoteness and still
recovering from the country’s bloody 16-year
civil war, which ended in 1992. It’s home to East
African stars—elephants, buffalo, lions, Afri-
can wild dogs—as well as curiosities such as the
Boehm’s zebra, Johnston’s impala, and Niassa
wildebeest. Its spreading plains are embroi-
dered with woodlands, forests, and floodplains
and dotted with granite inselbergs—rocky

116 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 Tunduru

T A N Z A N I A
Gomba
Negomano
Nalasi a
uvum
R
Matchedje Mbunjo
Naulala
ng o Milepa
4,216 ft
eri

1,285 m
ch

N I A S. S A S P E C I A L R E S E R V E
Lu

ts íte

r
M  4,728 ft Mecula

ui
a Matondovela 1,441 m
ng

M
Mariri
Lishengwe Mbamba
Si

Mpopo Trails Camp

4,383 ft Nantulo o

l
ssa
nda
Lichinga
1,336 m Luge

Me
Lugenda
Mataca
Inselberg
Plateau (island-like rocky outcrop)

Village inside the reserve

M O Z A M B I Q U E
Road/trail
.
ts da 20 mi
M
n
ge

le co 20 km
sa
Lu

o
re

M Marrupa Montepuez
Lu

Lichinga Balama

outcrops like galleons on the ocean. Lugenda River. Woven bamboo baskets on their
Since prehistoric times, people have lived and bikes brim with nyingu, a mudsucker, and cam-
traded in the region, their early presence recorded pango, a freshwater catfish plucked from the river
with Stone Age artifacts and renderings on granite in nets. The fish had been dried and smoked over
canvases. They’ve lived off the woodlands and an open-air fire back at the camp, the alchemy of
rivers, collecting wild meat, honey, fruit and nuts, curing turning their scales pewter and the flesh
firewood and medicinal plants, and catching fish. parchment-dry, giving it a shelf life of weeks.
They’ve added crop growing to their daily round, To the Yao, fish are more than simply a source
cultivating maize, peanuts, beans, sesame, sor- of scarce protein. They’re as valuable as newly
ghum, and cash crops such as tobacco. Today minted coins. Villagers barter fish for cooking oil,
the more than 60,000 people in hamlets across rice, even clothes, in the local market. Mbamba
Niassa continue to live off the land, although is also still connected to age-old trading routes
the reserve’s joint managers—Mozambique’s that crisscross the area, allowing fishermen to sell
National Administration for Conservation Areas some of their catch to traders from elsewhere in
(ANAC) and the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation the reserve and beyond. “People are coming from
Society—control fishing and hunting. A licensing Cabo Delgado,” a province to the east, says Ben-
system limits when, where, and how fish can be vindo Napuanha, community manager for the
caught. And hunting wild meat for the pot, or to Niassa Carnivore Project (NCP), a conservation
sell to local traders, is banned now. People are initiative set up in 2003. “We even have people
encouraged to raise ducks, chickens, and rabbits from Tanzania buying this fish,” he adds.
as alternative sources of protein. Most of Niassa—72 percent of its land—is
One November morning, on the road nearing allocated for sport-hunting concessions, which
Mbamba, fishermen push bicycles to market private operators lease for up to 25 years with
along the same dusty track the villagers occa- the option of renewal. Each hunting block gets
sionally share with various four-footed pedestri- a quota of trophy species that can be shot, such
ans—elephants, lions, antelope—after spending as buffalo, leopards, lions, and antelope. After a
weeks at a camp nine miles downstream on the trophy animal is killed, concessions often give

CHRISTINE FELLENZ, NGM STAFF; BRANDON SHYPKOWSKI. SOURCES: PHILIP DESMET,

NIASSA GAME RESERVE VEGETATION GIS DATA, 2016; OPENSTREETMAP; GREEN MARBLE
118 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 Honey hunter Luís
Iwene pegs a rudimen-
tary ladder of wooden
stakes into the trunk
of a baobab so he can
ascend to an open-air
beehive high up at the
base of the crown.
The bees are calmer
at night, but without
protective gear, Iwene
will endure many stings
as he breaks off chunks
of honeycomb to take
back to his village.

A N E XC E P T I O N A L W I L D E R N E S S 119
 RIGHT

Seliano Alberto
Runcunua (at left) and
his assistant collect
honeycomb from a
hive in a dead tree.
Yao honey hunters are
led to hidden hives
by a bird—the greater
honeyguide—using
a call-and-response
collaboration. When
recovering the prize,
the Yao leave a honey-
comb treat for the
bird to eat.

BELOW

After a successful
honey hunt, other ani-
mals, such as this honey
badger and her cub,
feast on the remaining
honey and discarded
comb. The honey bad-
ger is known to enjoy
these sweet spoils, but
a recent camera-trap
study revealed that
baboons, mongooses,
striped bush squirrels,
and crowned horn-
bills also partake.

the body to villagers for its meat. Just over a
fourth of the reserve is for nonhunting tourism,
and one percent for special conservation areas
where no tourism is allowed. Trophy hunting
accounts for more than four-fifths of the reserve’s
million-dollar annual tourism revenue. After the
government takes its cut, villagers get 20 percent
of the income to spend as they see fit.
in this part
OV E M B E R
N of Mozambique is so
u n c o m f o r t a b l e i t ’s
sometimes called “sui-
cide month,” when the
rains are imminent and
the mercury pushes upwards of a hundred
degrees. One soporific morning, a group of
villagers seem oblivious to the draining heat
as they hoist rocks bigger than footballs into
wire gabion frames to shore up a section of wall
along a two-and-a-half-mile trench they’d dug
around Mbamba two years earlier. About six
feet deep, the dry moat keeps elephants and
buffalo from wandering in.
The village lies in the south of the reserve
and works with NCP, which operates out of
the Mariri Environmental Centre six miles to
the east along the Lugenda River. The project
is funded largely by donors and aims to find
ways for communities across the reserve to
live in harmony with and help protect large
carnivores.
In 2012, Mbamba’s leaders signed an agree-
ment with Mariri Investimentos, the orga-
nization that runs the project and leases a
224-square-mile conservation concession sur-
rounding the village. An innovative partnership,
Tchova-Tchova (meaning “You push, I push”),
emerged. Its goal is to boost community income
and food production and include villagers in
conservation projects while allowing them to
manage essential needs, such as water supply,
solar lighting, schooling for children, and crop
protection against hungry animals. Because of
Tchova-Tchova, Mbamba residents find jobs
at the environmental center and the Mpopo
Ecolodge, in construction, in road maintenance,
and as rangers.
In return, villagers are encouraged to pro-
tect wildlife and habitat. The more animals,
the more tourism dollars, the rationale goes.
A community conservation fund adminis-
tered by the villagers rewards wildlife-friendly
behavior. For every tourist who visits the envi-
ronmental center, Mariri Investimentos pays
$25 into the fund. For every prize animal a tour-
ist spots—a lion, elephant, leopard, buffalo,
wild dog, or hyena—Mariri pays eight dollars
into the fund. For every month with no ele-
phant poaching in the vicinity, the fund earns
$155. But if Mariri’s rangers find evidence of
poaching, money is deducted—$19 for every
snare, for example; $232 is docked for every lion
killed; and a poached elephant takes $310 from
the community fund.
People caught poaching in Niassa mostly
want animals for meat to eat at home or to sell
for cash to buy maize or satisfy other needs. The
Tchova-Tchova partnership between Mbamba
A N E XC E P T I O N A L W I L D E R N E S S 121
Niassa-born Eusebio
Waiti learned track-
ing and bush skills as
a subsistence hunter,
expertise he now
applies in his role as
a conservation field-
worker. He radio-tracks
lions, manages more
than a hundred
camera traps, and
works to find solutions
to “problem lions”
reported by villagers.
and Mariri might show how a collaboration
of this kind can address poaching for the pot
across the reserve. Since its inception, snaring
for bushmeat has dropped dramatically. There’s
a noticeable increase in ungulates around
Mbamba, such as waterbuck and impalas,
along with warthogs and hippos, suggesting
that wildlife is benefiting. Some carnivores are
doing better in this part of the reserve too. The
number of lion prides has increased from two
to seven since the agreement came into play,
according to NCP. Leopards and wild dogs are
also recovering, partly because of a greater
abundance of prey.
This is the kind of community partnership
ANAC expects of concessionaires, conservation-
ists, and NGOs, says Niassa’s warden, Terêncio
Tamele. “It’s part of the contract and perfor-
mance review of the concessionaires,” he says.
The collaboration could include conservation,
health, education, and employment programs,
helping keep the wilderness intact.
Just over a decade ago some 12,000 elephants
roamed Niassa’s wilds, but by 2018 a fever of
ivory poaching had reduced the number to an
estimated 3,150. (A pyramid of elephant skulls
beneath a marula tree at Mariri Environmental
Centre stands as a poignant memorial.)
During the past half decade, ivory poaching has
slowed, and rangers and villagers report bigger
herds, with more babies and adolescents; ele-
phant numbers are up to nearly 4,000. Around
Mbamba, the villagers’ anti-elephant trench is
the first of its kind in Niassa, a nonlethal way to
prevent dangerous encounters. More than 200
villagers signed up for the grueling three-month
excavation, paid for mostly by NCP, with a quar- H E TOW E R I N G BAO BA B’ S
ter coming from the Tchova-Tchova fund—a
dollar for every foot of trench, bringing $19,000
into households.
The day I saw workers slogging through the
morning heat to reinforce the trench, some men
were tending a young banana plantation inside
T bark is as dimpled as the
surface of the moon under
the campfire’s flickering
light, which throws into
relief scars from hand-
hewn stakes hammered into the bark.
the new perimeter, out of reach of hungry ele- Thup-thup-thup!
phants. One elderly man dragged a hose from Mbamba villager Luís Iwene, 28, is climbing
tree to tree, irrigating each with water drawn toward the crown the way many elders have
from a nearby well by a solar-powered pump. before him. He pounds fresh stakes into the
Plump bananas hung like baseball mitts from trunk and hoists his tools as he goes: a coil of
the slender adolescent trees, safe from peckish rope made from knotted lengths of bark; a plastic
elephants. Villagers say they now get to keep the bucket; a large kitchen knife hanging from his
mangoes and papayas from trees growing along waistband. He’s bare-chested and barefooted,
Mbamba’s streets for themselves, since they no wearing nothing more than cutoff denims as
longer have to compete with visiting elephants. he scales the bole with the ease of a high-wire

124 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
LEFT

African wild dogs

from the Mpopo pack
skirmish near their den
on the dry riverbed
they were named for.
The reserve is an impor-
tant refuge for these
endangered “painted
dogs.” Niassa’s popula-
tion seems to have
stabilized at about 350
in 30 to 35 packs.

BELOW

The elusive aardvark—

literally, earth pig—
emerges from its
burrow after dark to
forage for ants and
termites. Niassa has an
ample number of these
ecosystem engineers,
which use their pow-
erful digging ability to
excavate chambers that
many other animals
later use for shelter.
Yao villagers in
Mbamba dig a two-
and-a-half-mile trench
around their settle-
ment. Like a dry moat,
this is the first of its
kind in Niassa and one
of several nonlethal
ways to avoid crop
damage by elephants
and deadly encoun-
ters with them.
The skulls of buffalo
shot as trophies are
measured before
being shipped to their
respective hunters.
Hunting tourism bol-
sters Niassa’s economy,
along with income
from safaris and con-
servation projects.
acrobat. He squats on the rungs, methodically
pegging the next steps of his rudimentary ladder.
Thup-thup-thup-thup-thup!
The prize awaits above, tucked into the crook
of a branch high overhead: folds of honeycomb,
brimming with liquid gold, shimmering under
the buzzing attention of myriad bees. Come
nightfall, bees are dozy and less likely to sting,
which makes a nocturnal honey raid safer.
Thup-thup-thup!
At the top, Iwene steadies himself with one
hand, balances on the pegs, and coaxes to life
the smoldering tip of a bundle of dried thatching
grass, nearly half as long as he is tall. From the
ground, it looks no bigger than a burning match-
stick and Iwene himself no taller than a child.
The baobab is still a youngster—maybe 500 years
old—for a species that can live 2,000 years; even
so, it’s a giant that reduces smaller surrounding
woodland trees to Giacometti stick figures.
Yao have long used the mastery of fire and
smoke to conjure honey from behind bees’
defensive veils, although their forays don’t go
unpunished. Honey collectors get stung, and
there are times, Iwene says, when you have to
give up. “For sure, we run sometimes. If the
fire goes out or if the bees come in swarms,
that’s it—you run.” Tonight the bees acquiesce.
Iwene is free to break off curtains of honeycomb,
occasionally swatting at his face while he drops
chunks into the bucket.
He learned to harvest wild honey under the
tutelage of other masters, observing how expe-
rienced collectors climb trees to tap hives. He
undertakes these feats of dexterity about 10
times a year. He seldom removes more than half
a bucketful of honeycomb, leaving plenty for the
hive. This is enough to take home to Mbamba, call sego. It’s one of few animals that can digest
about 12 miles from here, where Iwene and his beeswax. When the birds see a person, and a
family will eagerly spoon it up. If it’s still fresh, hive is not far away, they utter a chittering Morse
they may eat pieces of honeycomb pulsing with code—tji-tji-tji tji-tji-tji—to signal there’s honey
bee brood, which is less sweet but rich in protein. to be had nearby. An attentive Yao answers with
He may also trade some honey for cash or barter a distinctive brrrr-HM, brrrr-HM, brrr-HM.
it with fellow villagers for other kinds of foods. The honeyguide leads the way, flitting from
Forest fruits such as tamarinds, marulas, and tree to tree with the honey hunter in pursuit,
baobabs wax and wane with the seasons, but calling back and forth as they go. When hunter
bees are always working, which is why honey tra- and bird reach the hive, he pacifies the bees
ditionally has been an important source of sweet with smoke, chops down the tree, cracks open
food for the Yao. Some hives are hidden inside the bole with an axe, and pulls the honeycomb
woody nooks or hollow trees far smaller than free. Then he shares the loot, leaving a pile of
baobabs. To get to them, Yao honey collectors sugar-laden honeycomb for his guide.
have struck up a mutually beneficial relation- In 2015, evolutionary biologist Claire Spottis-
ship with the greater honeyguide, a bird they woode, from the University of Cape Town, in

130 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

South Africa, and Cambridge University, in the
U.K., teamed up with Yao honey hunters Orlando
Yassene and Musaji Muamedi to find out if the
birds are responding to any old sound or specif-
ically to the Yao call. The team walked through
the woodlands on a series of simulated honey
hunts, playing three different sounds on a por-
table speaker: the Yao’s brrrr-HM call; arbitrary
human sounds; and other animal sounds, such
as the call of a ring-necked dove. The segos were
at least twice as responsive to the brrrr-HM call
and led the team to hives three times more often
in response to it.
There’s no guarantee that this ancient, sing-
song cooperation, which has already vanished
from many parts of Africa, will endure in Niassa.
Worshippers at
the sacred place of
Chemambo give
food offerings to the
ancestor baboons.
In the dry season,
during a days-long
pilgrimage, followers
from across Niassa
and beyond pray
beneath a hallowed
baobab and ask
their ancestors for
happiness, health,
and abundance.
In South Africa, “wild honey hunting is now very
rare,” according to Spottiswoode. “The birds con-
tinue to call us, but few people listen.” If it’s easier
to buy refined sugar in Mbamba’s marketplace,
why take on a task as laborious and potentially
painful as collecting honey high up in a baobab
or from deep inside a woodland tree?
After Iwene lowers his bucket to the end of
the bark rope, he scampers down the pegged
rungs with ease. On the ground, forearms
glistening with honey in the firelight, his face
breaks into a satisfied grin. Tonight is a sweet
night in Niassa’s remote woodlands. j
Leonie Joubert, a South African science writer, has
written more than 10 books—and our story in the
July 2021 issue about wildlife in the Kalahari.
A N E XC E P T I O N A L W I L D E R N E S S 131
 INSTAGRAM
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FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS

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 L I V E ST RO N G E R ,
B E T T E R , LO N G E R !

Best-selling author Dan Buettner returns

to the original five blue zones to check in
on the super agers and interpret the not-
so-secret sauce of purpose, faith, commu-
nity, downtime, natural movement, and
plant-based eating that has powered as
many as 10 additional years of healthy living
in these regions. And Buettner reveals an
all-new blue zone—the first human-made
blue zone yet explored.

Discover these other books by Dan Buettner

AVA I L A B L E W H E R E V E R B O O K S A R E S O L D

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