Photo by Alan Highton

Not only can lightning strike the same place twice, but on Lake Maracaibo, at the mouth of the Catatumbo River in northwestern Venezuela, it flashes almost continuously nearly 200 nights (and days) of the year. The ancient Yukpa people believed the bursts of blue, pink, and white light, known as Catatumbo lightning, were sparked when fireflies met ancestral spirits. For centuries mariners navigated by the brilliant discharges, visible up to a hundred miles out at sea. The phenomenon is “beautiful, like fireworks in the middle of the night,” says Ángel G. Muñoz, a scientist at the University of Zulia in Maracaibo.

Our ship sits in Flandres Bay, a deep fjord on the Antarctic Peninsula ringed by mountains whose sheer granite torsos fade, headless, into a ceiling of mist. The air is still. The water is glass. And rain—Who'da thunk it? Rain in Antarctica!—scatters ripples onto the bay.

Today’s muggy 36 degrees Fahrenheit finds me tossing aside my down jacket as I head outside. I walk into the drizzle wearing blue jeans and a light synthetic pullover. From the top deck of the Nathaniel B. Palmer one can see half a dozen humpback whales feeding on swarms of krill. At times, two of them pause and lazily hover side by side—so close they must be touching—just below the water’s surface.

The Palmer sailed for several days to reach this place on the west side of the peninsula, after turning back twice in the face of impassable sea ice on the east side.

The west is a different place. The low-pressure weather systems that sashay in an endless parade around Antarctica dump their full weight of warmth and precipitation on the western edge of the peninsula. Sea ice that forms during winter doesn’t survive summers here; since arriving three days ago, we haven’t seen a speck of it. The heavy snowfall gluts glaciers beyond their capacity. All around us traffic jams of ice blocks tumble out of the mountains, in freeze-frame, down 45-degree chutes to the water's edge. Without any familiar frames of reference such as cars or trees, the mind can scarcely comprehend the size of the scenery. The nearest glacier seems a couple hundred yards away. In fact, it’s more than a mile. Those blocks of ice are as big as houses.

64.28 degrees South latitude
58.86 degrees West longitude

It's a scorching day by Antarctic standards—47 degrees Fahrenheit and a cloudless sky. Two hours ago a helicopter ferried us from the Nathaniel B. Palmer to this rocky nunatak, or mountain, that juts from an apron of glacial ice on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. As we hiked, I quickly peeled off my jacket, hat, and gloves and pushed my sleeves up to the elbow.

Greg Balco, a glacial geologist from the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, strides up a slope of loose scree, steadying himself with trekking poles. Balco is hunting for the perfect rock—one that will reveal the glacial history of this place—but today his job is almost impossible.

An Asian vine with flowers that smell like grape drink, kudzu enticed Americans at a Philadelphia exhibition in 1876. In the 1930s Southerners started planting it to halt soil erosion. They stopped in the ’50s, when they realized that the hardy perennial, which can spread up to 60 feet a year, was out of control. Since then, the vine has swallowed 150,000 acres a year—eight million U.S. acres total. Eliminating it would require a constant war waged by scythes, grazing cattle, and potent herbicides. That’s not likely to happen.

At 3 p.m. on this dim, socked-in afternoon, the Nathaniel B. Palmer reached its rendezvous point—63.7658 degrees south, 56.8273 degrees west—an unremarkable patch of water littered with scraps of sea ice. Ten months earlier a treasure had been dropped into the sea at this spot and anchored to the muddy bottom, 2,112 feet below, by a lead weight. On this day Craig Smith, a marine ecologist from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was returning on the Palmer to reclaim his treasure. His prospects looked grim.

Rough weather this morning. We’re just under halfway across the Drake Passage, which separates South America from Antarctica, and the sea is handing us a whipping. Winds up to 55 knots and gusts up to 100 have piled the sea into an endless stampede of rolling swells. 

As I step out of bed, my bare feet slide across the tilting floor—right, then left, then right again. I resort to sitting on the floor as I gather my things. Showering while holding on white-knuckled with one hand, lathering with the other, and bracing both feet evokes a feeling of absurdity—an attempt to maintain normalcy when things are in fact far from normal, like awakening into an episode of Laverne & Shirley or I Love Lucy. Except in this case the hanging on isn’t just funny; it’s all that separates me from serious injury.

 54.17 degrees South latitude
 70.90 degrees West longitude

Welcome to the town of Punta Arenas, Chile, at the southern tip of South America. At the pier sits the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot icebreaker and research vessel operated by the United States Antarctic Program. 

We’ll soon head south on this ship across the Drake Passage, and sail along the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of land that reaches up from the main part of Antarctica and tickles the dangling nubbin of South America. On board the Palmer are roughly two dozen scientists and several dozen crew—plus a trio of journalists on assignment with National Geographic: Maria Stenzel, photographer; Sarah Park, videographer; and myself, Douglas Fox, the writer.

Our voyage will last 59 days; we plan to return to port on March 2 or so. The purpose of the trip is to study how Antarctica is responding to rising temperatures—and no better place to do it than the Antarctic Peninsula, where average temperatures have risen 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years—nearly five times as quickly as in most other parts of the planet. The ice in this part of Antarctica has seen some dramatic, in some cases even catastrophic, changes. More on that in a minute.

Why are some loons acting so, well, loony? Mercury. Long-term studies of common loons in the United States and Canada reveal that the toxic stuff is invading birds’ brains and bodies in dangerous concentrations. It’s disrupting behavior and physiology—and could put loon populations in peril.

In the National Arboretum’s parched herbarium, where dried plants date to the 1790s, Alan Whittemore is providing needed acorn perspective. A year after few fell in parts of the U.S., the botanist says hungry squirrels and an anxious press—which breathlessly wondered, Is it climate change?—can relax.

Fungi that pop up in the forest are “like CO2 chimneys,” says researcher Steven Allison. Back in 2005 he measured the carbon dioxide emitted by mushrooms after their rootlike mycelia ate carbon from the soil. He was “shocked” by their output—and concerned, since CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere.

Count your damaged and unwanted CDs and DVDs. Multiply by millions of folks like you. Add in the business world’s used data CDs and music, video game, and movie returns. The total is billions of trashed discs a year. How do you keep them out of the landfill?

Are you a green type? The new Ecofont, from the Dutch marketing firm Spranq, aims to be one. Co-owner Alexander Kraaij says it uses less ink than other typefaces, thus saving money and resources. In fact, he contends, a company with 5,000 workers could trim up to $125,000 a year from its printing costs.

When Los Angeles attorney Sean Farrell plunged into the numbing ocean off the Antarctic Peninsula in 2007 (above), the view was just what he had hoped: a vast white wilderness. But every few days Farrell, who was on a chartered yacht, spied tourist boats in the distance. A spike in visitors to Antarctica— up 250 percent during the past decade to 46,000—has Farrell wondering if the great white continent wouldn’t be better off if he’d stayed home. “Everybody wants to see natural beauty,” he says. “But even the most conscientious traveler will have an impact.” 

If the dark seems a little darker these days—and the world a bit less wonderful—it probably is. Researchers in Asia, Europe, and North America are seeing dramatic declines in fireflies. Thailand is one place that seems to be losing the bioluminescent beetles. For centuries they blinked along Thai rivers with splendid synchronicity. Foreign visitors compared their lights to chandeliers or Christmas candles. Locals were able to fish solely by their flashes.

“You have to get up early if you want to beat Otto” was the saying in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley, where I grew up. Otto was Otto Bohnert, “an awesome farmer—always experimenting,” says Dick Dunn, his nephew, also a farmer. Otto was famous for his 120-bushel-an-acre wheat crop in the late 1960s—in the midst of the green revolution, the movement to increase food yields by using new technology. His yields, thanks to superior wheat varieties, irrigation, and chemical fertilizers, were double the normal in our valley.

Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez impaled itself on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The tanker leaked 38,800 metric tons of crude oil, fouling 1,300 miles of coastline and wrecking the local fishing industry. During the next 20 years, Exxon spent more than two billion dollars on cleanup and lawsuits.

We talk a lot about the hardware of environmentally responsible buildings, like double-pane windows, energy-efficient heat pumps, and compact fluorescent bulbs. Those are unarguably important and necessary, but it's difficult to feel uplifted by the sight of a roll of R-38 fiberglass insulation.

That's what makes this month's story on green roofs so engaging. Here is where being responsible and attuned to the environment pairs up with spiritual satisfaction. I defy you to look at the image on page 86-87 of the cottage-like garden atop a Manhattan apartment roof and not smile.

“I love those first little green leaves,” says octogenarian Jean Combes of England’s oaks in spring. Since age 11 she’s jotted down signs of winter’s end. Too bad her girlish script shamed her and she tossed her first decade of notes. Such data are vital to phenology, the study of the timing of nature’s cycles. The science is gaining visibility as climate change blurs seasonal lines.


We are getting closer to the point where we may have to employ emergency engineering solutions to cool the planet, according to panelists at a geoengineering session during last week's Aspen Environment Forum.

The economic climate is right for redefining the automobile industry, Elizabeth Lowery, vice president for environment, energy, and safety policy at General Motors said last week at the Aspen Environment Forum.

Electric cars are the short-term solution to wean the world off of gas and oil and in return reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are driving climate change, according to a panel at the Forum on the future of transportation.

Just six days into the job, Jane Lubchenco, the new head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tells National Geographic "there is a great urgency in addressing [ocean] acidification by reducing CO2 emissions."

"The decisions that individuals make every day add up to affect our global climate," Lubchenco added. "The changes we are seeing now are influenced by our energy choices and uses over the last couple hundred years."

Oceans serve as a carbon sink, absorbing about a third of human-generated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The additional CO2 changes the chemical composition and lowers the pH of the seas. Acidic waters can prevent some marine life from producing calcium carbonate needed for shells and exoskeletons.

Lubchenco, a marine biologist and former Oregon State University professor, was at the Aspen Environment Forum in Colorado yesterday to talk about climate change politics and science.

On a Rocky Mountain day that saw cloudy skies and several inches of powder, solar energy experts gathered at the Aspen Environment Forum encouraged conference participants to turn sunlight, normally abundant in Colorado, into profit. 

Solar power is expected to be a growth market, in both developed and developing countries.

While captured sunlight will never account for the bulk of energy on a global or regional scale, it could provide up to 25 percent of U.S. energy needs and play an important role in delivering energy to poorer countries, said Neville Williams, founder of several solar companies and the author of Chasing the Sun.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2007, solar energy accounted for less than one percent of total American energy use.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson outlines her priorities and tells National Geographic that the EPA is back, ready to protect human health and the environment, despite the bumpy road ahead.

Jackson told a crowd of more than two hundred Aspen Environment Forum participants last night that EPA's top strategy for tackling climate change is to work with Congress on legislation, instead of focusing on amendments to the Clean Air Act that would allow regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.

The 2009 Aspen Environment Forum—focused on sustainable energy—kicks off today in Colorado.

Wal-Mart executives, green building experts, climate scientists, Economist and Washington Post reporters, and government officials from Mozambique, Panama, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among many others, will mingle among the mountains as they discuss climate change, energy extraction and use, innovation and technology, efficiency, and conservation.

Samantha (at left) and Natalie Turner sweep sludge from a trough on their family’s drought-stricken farm in New South Wales, Australia.

The diesel engine clatters to life. My friend Mike is giving me a quick lesson in how to operate his father’s bulldozer. Accompanied by a cacophony of metal on metal, I maneuver pedals and levers. I lower the blade and begin knocking down trees. I’m helping build a logging road near Prospect, Oregon. Despite a lack of finesse, I’m making progress and having fun. I’m on top of the world.

When I read Robert Draper’s “Australia’s Dry Run” and look at Amy Toensing’s photographs in this month’s issue, I’m reminded of that day three decades ago when I was young and didn’t understand the potential consequences of bulldozers.

Photographer Tyrone Turner photographed the March 2009 coverage on energy efficiency and produced a striking set of images using a thermal camera. I had a chance to ask him about the challenges of the assignment.

“There is no feast which does not come to an end,” a Chinese proverb warns, and this month’s story on Canadian oil sands is a cautionary tale about the consequences of large appetites. With the decline of conventional oil reserves and the rising price of oil extraction, sources like oil sands—layers of tarlike bitumen mixed with clay, sand, and water—are increasingly attractive as a way to satisfy the world’s craving for hydrocarbons. The catch: Extracting them is messy and costly to the environment.