Printed on August 27, 2007 National Geographic Channel

February 2007 Archives

Inside North Korea

February 27, 2007 4:32 PM

Lisa Ling I have traveled to many places on many continents, but I never felt my personal freedom limited as much as it was during our time in North Korea. North Korea is usually off-limits to foreigners—especially to Americans.

In order to film the work of Dr. Ruit, a Nepalese eye surgeon, the only way that I could enter the secretive state was to go undercover posing as part of his medical team. Ruit’s goal is to heal patients in poor countries who have gone blind from cataracts. My cameraman and I hoped that we would also get glimpses of real life in North Korea. It turned out to be one of the hardest assignments I had. The government sent us six (!) minders who accompanied us all the way from Katmandu, Nepal to North Korea and back. In Pyongyang they took away our passports and cell phones. There wasn’t a moment when we could wander off and walk around unobserved. I had to stay within eyesight of the hotel, so I jogged in circles around the compound. This is what prison must feel like. The only North Korean citizens we were officially allowed to film were Dr. Ruit’s patients. The number of people who came to see him was overwhelming. In the developed world cataracts hardly ever cause blindness, and mostly elderly people are affected. Here, children and old people alike had lived in the dark for years. All were hoping for a miracle. We witnessed Dr. Ruit and his team operate on more than one thousand people in only six days. It was an act of unbelievable stamina, and proved Dr. Ruit’s deep-rooted humanity.

Then the crucial day arrived. A thousand fearful and expectant patients with their eyes bandaged were gathered in one room. What would happen when the bandages come off? Nobody knew and everybody, including us, held their breaths. Dr. Ruit went up to every single person, talked to each one soothingly – and slowly took off the bandage. One by one, we witnessed the miracle happening. Old women saw their grandchildren and children their parents for the first time after years in the dark. But what was so remarkable was that immediately after regaining their sight, rather than thanking the doctor, people started crying and bowing and giving thanks in front of pictures of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung as hundreds clapped and cheered in unison. I never saw such an extreme personality cult before.

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Doomsday Volcano

By explorer

February 27, 2007 4:28 PM

Iana Porter We descend down the cable car into the flooded crater of the doomsday volcano. This 5-mile wide caldera incites the imagination. The power that created this is unfathomable. Volcanoes are so complex that it’s hard for the experts to predict exactly when they will blow or how lethal their eruptions might be. This makes for a slightly edgy feeling. We have come to Santorini island, Greece to film National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Bob Ballard on an unprecedented underwater expedition into the heart of Thera. It is one of the most powerful volcanoes in human history.

3600 years ago this was ground zero. A colossal eruption spewed ash into the sky, shot searing gas hurricanes and raging tsunamis for miles in all directions and turned day into night for over 100,000 square miles. When it was all over, the city of Akrotiri lay buried in nearly 200 feet of ash and the world was thrust into a "big chill," with temperatures cooling across the entire planet. At around the same time, the Minoans, Europe's first civilization, vanished mysteriously. Could Thera’s explosion have reached their palaces 75 miles away in Crete? For nearly a century, experts scoured the land for geologic clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But a frustrating obstacle persisted. The powerful eruption shot huge volumes of magma out beyond the island and into the surrounding sea. Where it has remained hidden until now.

Continue reading Doomsday Volcano.

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Ultimate Shark

By explorer

February 21, 2007 4:24 PM

Ramón Bonfil, Ph.D. Facing a great white shark in its natural environment is one of the most humbling and life-marking experiences one can ever have, as long as this is done under controlled and safe conditions. I know this from first-hand experience. In the last 5 years I have had the stunning honor of handling 17 live great white sharks with my own hands, all in the name of science.

The most surprising fact people come to realize after seeing their first great white in the wild is that their typical behavior has nothing to do with the stereotype of ferocity and aggressiveness that has been force-fed to us through ‘killer shark’ movies and pseudo-documentaries. Great white sharks are surprisingly calm and cautious in their movements around cages with divers or with a boat floating at the surface. Only through skillful manipulation of bait can we provoke their aggressive behavior. After all, they are top predators and nobody likes to be teased when hungry. Why would anyone want to wrestle with live great whites for a living? The answer is surprisingly simple: because these vilified fish are under threat of extinction and we know very little about their biology and ecology. Despite their iconoclastic fame in pop culture, great white sharks are still largely a mystery to science.

The research we and other scientists around the world are conducting on the movements and migrations of great white sharks by using cutting-edge satellite tags and other electronic instruments is allowing us to map, better than ever, the ways in which they utilize the ocean and how they move in this vast environment. Until very recently everyone thought that great whites were chiefly a coastal species that only seldom would venture into the high seas. But thanks to satellite tagging studies like the one we just started in Guadalupe Island, Mexico, we know now that great white sharks have a diversity of spatial behaviors that include fidelity to very specific coastal areas for months at a time in addition to regular coastal migrations covering thousands of miles. More surprisingly, we discovered that great white sharks migrate across entire oceans and back. On February 2003, one of the sharks we tagged in South Africa crossed the entire Indian Ocean to the coast of Western Australia, and then crossed right back to South Africa, covering more than 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) in less than 9 months!

Continue reading Ultimate Shark.

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February 2007 Archives

Inside North Korea

Doomsday Volcano

Ultimate Shark

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