Posts tagged as National Geographic
Did They Find Atlantis?
In a strange coincidence of timing, considering the horrible news and footage coming out of Japan over the past three days, an international team of scientists working in south Spain believe they have pinpointed the location of the city of Atlantis. This is a major big deal in archeology. Plato wrote about Atlantis in 360 B.C. It was said to have been an engineering marvel located near the "Pillars of Hercules" (as the Straits of Gibralter were called back then), that it was built around an island temple to Poseidon which was surrounded by concentric rings of water and land, like a bulls-eye, and that it was "swallowed up by the sea and vanished" over a single day and night thousands of years earlier. People have been telling stories, and writing songs, and making movies and TV shows about it since—and searching for evidence to prove that it did in fact, ever exist. READ MORE
Filming Nature Footage Arduous, Amazing, Disgusting, Beautiful
Nice piece in the Times today about the process that went into filming the state-of-the-art nature footage featured in the Discovery Channel's new series "Life," which debuts Sunday. "In that first episode viewers see a strawberry dart frog's tadpoles come to life, then watch the mother carry each baby up a rainforest tree to a safe perch inside a bromeliad plant. Then they see the mother lay eggs to feed the newborns until they can move on their own, weeks later. Without any dialogue the shots tell a gripping story about a mother's commitment to her offspring." The National Geographic clip above, from 2008, shows the same. The Discovery version (which will by narrated by Oprah Winfrey, who will hopefully refrain from the funny-style inflection and corny jokes) was shot by a guy named Kevin Flay, who used a camera slightly larger than a tube of lipstick. READ MORE
Inaccessible Vistas More Accessible Via Internet
It's so good that different people are equipped to do different things. If I was to try to assemble my own motorized paraglider and fly over the Sahara Desert taking pictures, I would die probably ten minutes into the assembly part. Luckily, there's folks like National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz in the world, so I can do what I do best: sit at my computer. Breathtaking photography is here.
That Tsingy Is Too Tough
Places I'd like to visit if my feet were made of giant foam cushions reinforced with kevlar: The Tsingy de Bemaraha national park and reserve in Madagascar. "This 600-square-mile protected area is an island unto itself," according to a National Geographic story with a gorgeous photo gallery, "a kind of biofortress, rugged, largely unexplored, and made nearly impenetrable by the massive limestone formation-the tsingy-running through it." Made up of jagged, 300-foot-tall stone spires called "grikes," the tsingy is apparently like Manhattan combined with the most horrible gravel driveway you ever stepped on barefoot. READ MORE
