Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marcia for RADIOI and today I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic Magazine dated February twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: As a reminder, RADIOI is a rating service attended for
Speaker 1: people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
Speaker 1: it difficult to read printed material. Please join me now
Speaker 1: for the continuation of the article I began last time,
Speaker 1: entitled The Mystery of the Rings by Veronique Greenwood. When
Speaker 1: hundreds of eerily perfect circles were discovered on the ocean floor,
Speaker 1: theories abounded about what they could mean. Four years of
Speaker 1: underwater research revealed a lost world. Near the end of
Speaker 1: the trip, the scientists retreated to the ship's cabin, hooked
Speaker 1: up to the glitchy Internet. Barred and the others were
Speaker 1: reading papers, looking at maps, thinking over what they'd seen. Slowly,
Speaker 1: over the next few months, they put together a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Even though to a non expert, the knobs in the
Speaker 1: center of the rings might look like coral, they were not.
Speaker 1: They were deposits formed by coralline algai, photosynthetic organisms that
Speaker 1: create skeletons made of calcium carbonate. During the last ice Age,
Speaker 1: thousands of those algae colonies likely took root on what
Speaker 1: was then a very sunny seafloor. For three thousand years
Speaker 1: or so, these algae flourished, growing outward like domes or pancakes,
Speaker 1: measuring several yards. Then, around twenty thousand years ago, the
Speaker 1: world began to warm and continental ice sheets began to melt,
Speaker 1: funneling into the Mediterranean, which rose until the sun loving
Speaker 1: algae were drowned in darkness. Their domes collapsed, leaving only
Speaker 1: the central knobs and bits of calcium carbonate scattered like
Speaker 1: bones from a carcass around them. For thousands of years,
Speaker 1: nothing lived amid the remains that left a permanent imprint.
Speaker 1: But about eight thousand years ago the sea levels stabilized,
Speaker 1: deep water algae laid down new layers on the central knobs,
Speaker 1: creating the film of life the diverse saw. At the
Speaker 1: same time, rhodolith algae started to encase broken bits of calcium.
Speaker 1: The nuggets of algae rolled downhill from the knobs, settling
Speaker 1: around the base of the cones in perfect circles. That's
Speaker 1: everyone's best guess. The simple tug of gravity formed the rings.
Speaker 1: We don't have all the proof, admits Bollsta. Though we
Speaker 1: have nothing to say our history is wrong. Protecting the
Speaker 1: entire field of rings may prove difficult. Only about one
Speaker 1: third of them lie within the cap Course and Agriat
Speaker 1: Marine National Park, a French marine protected area, but the park,
Speaker 1: with help from Billesta's andromedae Oceanology, is taking on this challenge.
Speaker 1: Using data from Billesta's dives, it plans to abdocate for
Speaker 1: the further protection of all rings, even those located outside
Speaker 1: its bounds in French and Italian waters. The park's management
Speaker 1: council will propose prohibiting the anchoring of commercial vessels in
Speaker 1: this area. Normally, with this type of regulation it takes years,
Speaker 1: Bullesta says, but because so many of the rings already
Speaker 1: exist within a conservation zone, he's optimistic. He is also
Speaker 1: no longer thinking just about the rings, but about what
Speaker 1: they represent. Traces like these signs of the ancient coast line,
Speaker 1: including rings, submerged caves, and other mysterious structures, may be
Speaker 1: hidden all around the ocean floor. They are places for
Speaker 1: studying how the world is always building something new on
Speaker 1: the husk of a previous age. While there have been
Speaker 1: no sightings of the rings elsewhere, you have to realize
Speaker 1: that explorations at this depth have been rare in the
Speaker 1: Mediterranean seas. Her Gent Martini says, perhaps there are others
Speaker 1: that have not yet been discovered, secrets below the surface.
Speaker 1: Too shallow for most mining and too deep for most divers,
Speaker 1: parts of the ocean floor under just a few hundred
Speaker 1: feet of water are often overlooked. Recently, pioneering teams of
Speaker 1: divers and researchers began exploring a nearly four hundred foot
Speaker 1: deep section of the Mediterranean Sea. What they found on
Speaker 1: the bottom was shocking. Not just one giant, perfectly circular,
Speaker 1: completely mystifying ring, but one thousand, three hundred twenty five
Speaker 1: of them. What might have happened? Scientists are studying whether
Speaker 1: the highs and lows of temperature and sea water level
Speaker 1: over thousands of years dictated the growth and collapse of
Speaker 1: red algae that potentially formed the rings. Shallow start Shallow
Speaker 1: seas at the peak of the ice age let more
Speaker 1: sunlight reach the sea floor, fostering dome shaped red algae communities.
Speaker 1: Deadly shift, melting glaciers, and rising seas killed algae. Beginning
Speaker 1: an new formations of algae grew atop dead layers. Unattached
Speaker 1: clumps tumbled to the edges of circles creating rings. Next
Speaker 1: the rediscovered secrets of Project ice Worm. At the height
Speaker 1: of the Cold War, a classified military program built an
Speaker 1: improbable nuclear bass under the Arctic ice. Now scientists are
Speaker 1: taking a French fresh look at what went on there
Speaker 1: and drawing critical new insights about climate change. By Neil Schay.
Speaker 1: On a freezing day in October nineteen sixty, a team
Speaker 1: of U. S. Army technicians toiling at the top of
Speaker 1: the world stood in the belly of a glacier, making
Speaker 1: the final preparations that would bring a nuclear reactor to life.
Speaker 1: It was an experimental model, smallish and fickle, and these,
Speaker 1: of course, were the early years of atomic energy. The
Speaker 1: men knew that a single burst of radiation could kill them.
Speaker 1: They were surrounded by walls of glistening snow that muffled
Speaker 1: their voices, reflected the beams cassd by their lights, and
Speaker 1: absorbed the tick ticking of their Geiger counters. Far above
Speaker 1: their heads arched a ceiling of corrugated steel. Beneath their
Speaker 1: feet lay a mile thick slab of ice so old
Speaker 1: it reached back to the Plistocene. When the chain reaction
Speaker 1: finally began There was a flash of relief, maybe a
Speaker 1: tight shout of triumph in the nearby control room, but
Speaker 1: within minutes the team was scrambling to shut the reactor down.
Speaker 1: Somewhere deep in the ice was a leak. Radioactive neutrons
Speaker 1: were spilling into the darkness. Imagine the men there for
Speaker 1: a moment, encased in a glacier in Greenland, struggling to
Speaker 1: fire up a reactor, perhaps the only humans to be
Speaker 1: so perfectly suspended between the ice age and the atomic age.
Speaker 1: No one had ever done what they were doing, and
Speaker 1: no one would ever try it again publicly. The elaborate
Speaker 1: gambit they were a part of was meant to project
Speaker 1: American ingenuity. The careful construction of a vast under ice
Speaker 1: military base aimed Camp Century that would show the world
Speaker 1: that the United States could transform even the coldest, harshest
Speaker 1: environment into a habitable place. It would be the ice
Speaker 1: sport to end all ice forts. The world's first atomic
Speaker 1: powered military station carved into a glacier was a triumph
Speaker 1: of engineering, a victory over the elements, its brave crews
Speaker 1: bringing civilization and scientific rigor to the polar waste. After
Speaker 1: Camp century was up and running, newspapers and magazines, including
Speaker 1: National Geographic, sent reporters to visit the Arctic outpost and
Speaker 1: tour its labyrinth of tunnels, all lit up by that reactor,
Speaker 1: by then its leak fixed with lead bricks and a
Speaker 1: lot of inventive engineering. What the visiting journalists weren't told,
Speaker 1: nor were many of the soldiers living at the station,
Speaker 1: which could house up to two hundred, was that Camp
Speaker 1: Century was a cover for a secret Cold War Army project,
Speaker 1: Unknown even to Greenland's Danish government, the plan remained classified
Speaker 1: for decades. America's ambition in the frozen North wasn't so
Speaker 1: much about developing portable atomic power as it was about
Speaker 1: turning the ice cap into a sprawling ballistic missile base.
Speaker 1: The Army, according to now declassified documents, cited the area's
Speaker 1: unique adaptability to nuclear deployment. Remote near Russia and hard
Speaker 1: to target. The plan, known as Project ice Worm, imagined
Speaker 1: threading the tunnels of Camp Century and beyond with railway
Speaker 1: tracks that could covertly house and transport up to six
Speaker 1: hundred nuclear tipped missiles that could be aimed over the
Speaker 1: pole at the Soviet Union. To day, nothing of that
Speaker 1: audacious military scheme remains. Camp Century was abandoned long ago
Speaker 1: by the Army, and its tunnels beneath the snow were
Speaker 1: crushed and swallowed by the restless ice. But a more
Speaker 1: surprising legacy endurers thanks to several long overlooked jars stashed
Speaker 1: away in deep free storage for decades, some of the
Speaker 1: last remnants of an unheralded scientific project performed at Camp Century.
Speaker 1: The unexpected evidence inside those jars is now offering modern
Speaker 1: scientists a startling glimpse into the wetter, wilder, and more
Speaker 1: chaotic age that may await us. For the seven years
Speaker 1: that the base was operational, personnel at Camp Century labored
Speaker 1: and lived in extreme isolation. The base lay one hundred
Speaker 1: twenty seven miles away from the nearest human outpost, an
Speaker 1: Air Force base called Thuel. Shipments of food, fuel, and
Speaker 1: equipment were dragged on sleds to Century in long convoys
Speaker 1: known as swings. This was how people reached the camp too.
Speaker 1: Austin Kobak's, an Army research engineer now in his eighties
Speaker 1: who spent several seasons living at the camp, remembers that
Speaker 1: traveling by swaying took many hours, even in the best conditions,
Speaker 1: and in bad weather, blizzards, white outs, the severe gold
Speaker 1: cold that could fall like a hammer. The journey like
Speaker 1: take days. Sometimes swings even got lost in the endless
Speaker 1: arctic void. Still, the real risk, Kovac says, was boredom.
Speaker 1: At the camp. People thought it was dangerous, and it
Speaker 1: was not dangerous. It was uncomfortable, and at times it
Speaker 1: was very, very monotonous. The men lived in prefabricated bunk
Speaker 1: houses constructed inside the ice. Kovacs worked in what was
Speaker 1: called Trench thirty three, where he researched and studied foundations
Speaker 1: to support large buildings on polar ice caps. There was
Speaker 1: no sunlight, no bird song, no breeze. Movies were shown
Speaker 1: in the base theatre at least once a week. The
Speaker 1: library offered a modest collection of books. The men showered
Speaker 1: and shaved in a communal bathroom eight in a bright
Speaker 1: mess hall. All kinds of ways, trash, sewage, industrial chemicals,
Speaker 1: even the radioactive water used to cool the reactor was
Speaker 1: dumped back into the glacier, where it remains frozen in
Speaker 1: place for now. They drank water drawn from a well
Speaker 1: in the glacier. Once, when Kobak's and his comrades needed excitement,
Speaker 1: they lowered themselves down the wells, still cable dropping down
Speaker 1: a clusterphobically narrow ice shaft into an enormous, pitch black cavern.
Speaker 1: Hanging there in utter darkness was a thrill. Kovak's remembers
Speaker 1: waking in the morning to a woman's voice in song
Speaker 1: piped through the camp's loud speaker. It was a popular
Speaker 1: song at the time, he recalls, but after a while,
Speaker 1: after weeks and weeks, it got to be too much.
Speaker 1: You just wanted her to stop. Enough time has passed
Speaker 1: that now Kovaks can't recollect the song or the singer,
Speaker 1: just the way her voice drifted through the darkness. I
Speaker 1: wish I could remember her name. While Kobak's focused on
Speaker 1: his research, other men serviced the reactor or studied the
Speaker 1: movements of snow at the bottom of the base. One
Speaker 1: team was busy drilling a hole deep into the ice.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty six, after several years of steady labor,
Speaker 1: the men punched through the bottom of the glacier to
Speaker 1: the very service of green Land itself. They drilled more
Speaker 1: than four thousand feet, gathering in the process the first
Speaker 1: ice cores to ever penetrate an ice sheet, and almost
Speaker 1: on a whim, they went farther too, collecting eleven and
Speaker 1: a half feet of ancient frozen soil. They only stopped
Speaker 1: when a drill bearing burned out. That soil would form
Speaker 1: one of camp centuries most haunting legacies, though at the
Speaker 1: time no one thought much of it. For years after
Speaker 1: the base was abandoned, the soil was stored in jars
Speaker 1: in a freezer in Buffalo, New York, before being moved
Speaker 1: to a freezer in Denmark. There was little to suggest
Speaker 1: that something enlightening might be inside those jars, and few,
Speaker 1: if any, tools could help unlock their significance. It was
Speaker 1: only in twenty nineteen that Paul Biermann, a geoscientist and
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Vermont, and several of his
Speaker 1: colleagues began to study the contents of the jars. What
Speaker 1: they found has revolutionized our understanding of Greenland's ancient climate
Speaker 1: and offered a glimpse of our own possible future. Trapped
Speaker 1: in the soil Biermann's team discovered were bits of leaves, twigs, bosses,
Speaker 1: even insects. The remains could only have come from a
Speaker 1: time when the region was free of ice, not smothered
Speaker 1: in a mile thick glacier. The discovery painted a new
Speaker 1: picture of Greenland's past. There are things we can learn
Speaker 1: about ice sheets that we can never learn from the
Speaker 1: ice itself, says Bierman. It comes from the stuff below
Speaker 1: the ice. The soil samples provoked a radical departure from
Speaker 1: earlier vaguer thinking that Greenland's ice cap was a couple
Speaker 1: of million years old. Working with dozens of other scholars,
Speaker 1: Bierman showed that the ice cap was younger than anyone
Speaker 1: had imagined, The soil providing evidence that the land under
Speaker 1: Camp Century was ice free about four hundred thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: during a period in which the land mass had been
Speaker 1: slightly warmer than it is today and when sea levels
Speaker 1: were significantly higher. What emerges from the data, he explains,
Speaker 1: isn't merely an image of the past, but also perhaps
Speaker 1: a clearer vision of a future in which quadrillions of
Speaker 1: gallons of fresh water currently locked up in the Greenland
Speaker 1: ice cap melt into the ocean. If that happens, the
Speaker 1: impacts will be felt nearly everywhere, as coastal cities and
Speaker 1: farms are inundated, potentially turning billions of humans into climate refugees.
Speaker 1: It's eezy to car compartmentalize Greenland, to say, oh, that's
Speaker 1: the Arctic. It doesn't matter to me, says Bierman. But
Speaker 1: the long forgotten soil from Camp Sentry draws a straight
Speaker 1: line to the critical issue of our age. It takes
Speaker 1: you from nineteen sixty six to global climate change and
Speaker 1: onward to the effects of Greenland's melting. That's pretty profound.
Speaker 1: Project ice Worm was doomed from the start. What those
Speaker 1: Cold Warriors seem to have miscalculated when they were sketching
Speaker 1: out their missile tunnels beneath the snow was how much
Speaker 1: they could prevent glaciers from behaving as if they're alive,
Speaker 1: they slide and shrink, grow and flow. Building inside the
Speaker 1: glacier was too unstable and required too much maintenance. Rigid
Speaker 1: steel railways could buckle under the movement of the ice.
Speaker 1: Missiles might tip over. The atomic reactor, connected to a
Speaker 1: web of pipes, vents, and conduits that were themselves in motion,
Speaker 1: was at risk as the ice below it shifted. Soldiers
Speaker 1: armed with electric chainsaws roamed the narrow tunnels, working like sculptures,
Speaker 1: carving back the relentless snow. Army planners eventually had to
Speaker 1: admit that none of this was a good idea. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, the camp's reactor was shut down, and
Speaker 1: three years later, Century itself was abandoned. When Kovac returned
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine to conduct a survey, he found
Speaker 1: a total ruin. In a series of photographs he made
Speaker 1: of the base, one could see something like a mining
Speaker 1: disaster unfolding in slow motion. Tongues of snow spilled down passageways,
Speaker 1: steel structures collapse on themselves, wood beams splinter like bones.
Speaker 1: The photos give form to the glaciers, overwhelming in otherwise
Speaker 1: invisible weight. Humans had been gone only a short time,
Speaker 1: but already there was the suggestion of an inevitable one
Speaker 1: way journey, the debris being crushed, then swallowed, never to
Speaker 1: rise again, all but forgotten for half a century. The
Speaker 1: camp today delivers a clear eyed picture of Cold War excess,
Speaker 1: as well as a dose of nostalgia for a time
Speaker 1: of grandiose projects. Think of all the energy and resources
Speaker 1: it took to do this. Bearman says, to build those
Speaker 1: tunnels and put soldiers down there, it's almost science fiction.
Speaker 1: No one would dream of doing that today. For all
Speaker 1: that planning. None of the base as big thinking architects
Speaker 1: would ever have imagined that camp centuries enduring legacy would
Speaker 1: be the research conducted there, all part of the guise
Speaker 1: to hide the camp's ulterior nuclear aims. Scientists like Beerman
Speaker 1: are grateful for that irony, especially when you realize those
Speaker 1: guys drilling down in that trench back in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: six had no idea what would happen, no idea how
Speaker 1: important it would be, and they just kept going Arctic ambitions.
Speaker 1: Camp Century, completed in nineteen sixty was a pilot project
Speaker 1: for an ultimately unrealized but even more audacious plan to
Speaker 1: build hundreds of miles of connected tunnels, rail tracks, and
Speaker 1: missile silos across the Greenland ice sheet Dubbed twenty five
Speaker 1: feet below the snow. The camp provided both the comforts
Speaker 1: of home and cutting edge research facilities in one of
Speaker 1: the world's most inhospitable regions, advanced laboratories. Work in the
Speaker 1: research labs was conducted by civilians and military personnel, alike
Speaker 1: experts in fields such as geology, placiology, and seismology. Space
Speaker 1: age water supply developed by Camp Century engineer Rao Brigez
Speaker 1: This well dropped a steam heated element into the ice,
Speaker 1: creating a reservoir that provided the base with ten thousand
Speaker 1: gallons of water a day. Today, Nassau is exploring rod
Speaker 1: wells for water extraction on Mars. Sustainable power electricity was
Speaker 1: supplied by a portable nuclear reactor to avoid the logistical
Speaker 1: challenge of transporting a steady supply of diesel fuel for
Speaker 1: generators generators across the ice sheet. This was one of
Speaker 1: eight small reactors part of a now defunct U. S
Speaker 1: Army program to power far flung cold war bases. An
Speaker 1: icy main street, the primary access tunnel, wide enough for
Speaker 1: large vehicles, served as the major artery for the base.
Speaker 1: It was maintained by dedicated staff who cleared snow drifts
Speaker 1: and scraped walls to prevent moisture from a accumulating as
Speaker 1: ice cold comfort. The camp included a small library at chapel,
Speaker 1: a gymnasium in a movie theater that showed films regularly.
Speaker 1: Residents pass the time playing chess and cards, reading and
Speaker 1: writing letters. Fresh air in hot air out A ventilation
Speaker 1: system sucked in cold surface air through escape patches, then
Speaker 1: blew it through the tunnels and out toward the surface. Tunnel.
Speaker 1: Air temperature had to be kept at five degree fahrenheit
Speaker 1: to prevent melting dumping. Nuclear waste spent in highly radioactive
Speaker 1: uranium rods were returned to the US for disposal. Less
Speaker 1: radioactive waste water was diverted to a well more than
Speaker 1: three hundred feet away from the camp. Next, Ghosts of
Speaker 1: the Guano Islands in Peru, a photographer finds a novel
Speaker 1: way to pay homage to seabirds that were lost In
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. Ships full of workers sailed to islands
Speaker 1: off the coast of Peru to mine a precious resource,
Speaker 1: bird excrement, or guano, deposited by seabirds like cormorants, pelicans,
Speaker 1: and boobies. The chalky white material was sold as fertilizer
Speaker 1: to farmers around the world, but at an environmental cost.
Speaker 1: As trade increased, more people disturbed the bird's habitat, contributing
Speaker 1: to severe pollution declines on the order of population declines
Speaker 1: on the order of tens of millions. The steep drop
Speaker 1: in numbers inspired photographer and National Geographic Explorer Thomas Peschek
Speaker 1: to resurrect the ghosts of sea birds passed into a
Speaker 1: modern day landscape and says. In these archival photographs, se
Speaker 1: products images onto now diminished areas of the islands to
Speaker 1: share a unique perspective of the seabird crisis by Elena Zakos.
Speaker 1: Brutal conditions. Guano mining was not only an environmental concern,
Speaker 1: but also a humanitarian tragedy during the eighteen hundreds. Many
Speaker 1: workers were indentured servants or prisoners, forced to use pick
Speaker 1: axes to collect the excrement. The backdrop for this archival
Speaker 1: image is Isla Guanape morte hauling guano. Guano harvesting ships
Speaker 1: are displayed on stacked bags of recently gathered excrement on
Speaker 1: Isla Asia. Today, guana mining is still profitable, though highly regulated.
Speaker 1: The islands and their birds are protected by Peru's government.
Speaker 1: Next the tiny forest of a Bonzai Giant by Becky Little.
Speaker 1: The ancient art of bonza i may look deceptively simple,
Speaker 1: but its practice requires care, contemplation, and consistency over long
Speaker 1: periods of time, especially if you're growing an entire miniature
Speaker 1: forest like the famous living artifact known as goshin. This
Speaker 1: Bonsa I was started more than seventy years ago when
Speaker 1: Japanese American Banzai artist John Naka cut the top off
Speaker 1: a mature juniper tree and planted it in a pot.
Speaker 1: Over the next two decades, he surrounded it with ten
Speaker 1: more trees, one to honor each of his grandchildren. He
Speaker 1: named this miniature forests Gashin, which means protector of the
Speaker 1: spirit in Japanese. Today, Goshen is on display at the
Speaker 1: National Bonzai and Pengin Museum, part of the National Arboretum
Speaker 1: in Washington, d C. With the important distinction of being
Speaker 1: one of the world's best known Bonzai arrangements. Naka died
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, the age of eighty nine,
Speaker 1: but spent the last decades of his life teaching curators
Speaker 1: how to continue to care for the forest. According to
Speaker 1: his vision, for a tree to be healthy, you have
Speaker 1: to let it grow out and gain strength, says Michael James,
Speaker 1: curator at the museum. But when you do that, it
Speaker 1: gets out of shape. It doesn't look like a banzai anymore,
Speaker 1: so then you have to cut it back. That means
Speaker 1: no bonzai is ever truly finished. With proper attention, Goshin
Speaker 1: could live on for years. While bonzai is a historic
Speaker 1: Japanese art form dating back centuries. Early artists were likely
Speaker 1: inspired by the Chinese practice of pejing, which can be
Speaker 1: traced to the Han dynasty some two thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Pjing involves creating miniature potted landscapes that can include trees, rocks, water,
Speaker 1: human and animal figurines, and other features. But what sets
Speaker 1: Bonzai arrangement apart is there their sole focus on maintaining
Speaker 1: small trees with specific techniques for shaping that allow them
Speaker 1: to resemble much larger specimens. Naka, who was born in
Speaker 1: Fort Lupton, Colorado, discovered the practice after he moved at
Speaker 1: age eight with his parents to their home country of Japan. There,
Speaker 1: his grandfather introduced him to the art of bonzai. Nakav
Speaker 1: returned to Colorado in his twenties and eventually settled in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, where he helped found the California Bonzai Society.
Speaker 1: In the decades that followed, he became known nationally and
Speaker 1: worldwide as both an artist and a teacher. Naka gave
Speaker 1: Gasheen to the National Bonzai and Pengin Museum in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four. Today, Gashin stands out among Naka's Bonzai designs
Speaker 1: because of how large its trees are. It stands at
Speaker 1: nearly five feet at its tallest point, and how closely
Speaker 1: Naka was able to place them together. This is particularly
Speaker 1: difficult to do without overpruning the roots, which can cause
Speaker 1: the trees to wither and die. He would come every
Speaker 1: year and help the museum curators work on Gashin. James
Speaker 1: says about Naka's dedication to teaching the art to others,
Speaker 1: we are trying to preserve it. How he would have
Speaker 1: trunk textures. Bonzai artists create areas on the tree that
Speaker 1: resemble deadwood portions that lose their bark and are bleached
Speaker 1: by sunlight. Stripped branches are known as jin, while barkless
Speaker 1: trunks are called shari tree types. Banzai can be crafted
Speaker 1: from a wide range of trees. For his forest, Naka
Speaker 1: chose the Chinese juniper, whose immature, needle like foliage offers
Speaker 1: opportunities for sculpting putting down roots. An important part of
Speaker 1: Banzai art is cultivating exposed roots called nebari that flare
Speaker 1: out from the base, making smaller trees resemble much bigger
Speaker 1: ones for the birds. In Banzai art, foliage and branches
Speaker 1: should have space between them to help each arrange feel distinct.
Speaker 1: As artist John Naka reportedly equipped, leave room for the
Speaker 1: birds to fly through structural support. Bonzi artists use wires
Speaker 1: to make branches sore or sag, adding to the illusion
Speaker 1: that the trees are much larger than they actually are.
Speaker 1: The wire pulls a branch towards the ground, bearing it all.
Speaker 1: When lightning strikes tall trees that can result in dead
Speaker 1: spires that rise above the foliage. The nude trunks at
Speaker 1: the top of Gaushen mimic this phenomenon big and small.
Speaker 1: Bigger trees may draw the eye at first, but Naka
Speaker 1: believed the most important in Bonzai arrangements are both the
Speaker 1: largest and the smallest. The littlest tree at the back
Speaker 1: gives death to Gaushen secrets to living super small bombader beetle.
Speaker 1: When threatened, this insect has an explosive defense that produces
Speaker 1: an internal chemical reaction that releases a scalding and irritating
Speaker 1: fluid that can reach two hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit. It
Speaker 1: sprays the liquid from its rear end to repel predators.
Speaker 1: Diving bell spider, the only spider to live its whole
Speaker 1: life underwater, collects air bubbles from the surface using its
Speaker 1: abdominal hairs and carries them to a woven silk diving bell.
Speaker 1: The bell doubles as a gill, transferring oxygen from the
Speaker 1: water to help provide a twenty four hour supply. Tiger beetle.
Speaker 1: This beetle's long, thin legs help it reach unbelievable speeds,
Speaker 1: whether chasing prey or running from predators. In Australia, one
Speaker 1: less than an inch long species can run up to
Speaker 1: eight feet a second, among the fastest in the insect world.
Speaker 1: Peacock's spider. Instead of using a web, this jumping spiders
Speaker 1: stalks and pounces on its prey with incredible accuracy. Like
Speaker 1: most spiders, it has eight eyes that produce a nearly
Speaker 1: three hundred sixty degree view, but it's the two forward
Speaker 1: facing ones that create its high resolution color vision. Damsel fly.
Speaker 1: When laying eggs underwater, a female damsel fly can survive
Speaker 1: up to ninety minutes by breathing air in a bubble
Speaker 1: surrounding her body. After resurfacing, she moves her abdomen repeatedly,
Speaker 1: attracting males looking to mate to help her from the water.
Speaker 1: Heating the hill. The sprawling mounds of the redwood ant
Speaker 1: Formica Polychchina are the largest above ground ant nests in
Speaker 1: the world. They are also heat retaining wonders thanks to
Speaker 1: the thermoregulating prowess of millions of ants devoted to sustaining
Speaker 1: themselves and their young in Europe's Chili forests. After hibernating
Speaker 1: underground for the winter, the colony sun bathes outside or
Speaker 1: uses body fat reserves to vibrate and radiate heat, quickly
Speaker 1: increasing the nests internal structure. This concludes readings from National
Speaker 1: Geographic Magazine for Tiday. Your reader has been Marshall. If
Speaker 1: you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call
Speaker 1: at eight five nine four two two six three nine zero.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and have a great day.