Environment
Islands in the Sky
As the planet warms, the harsh conditions of the alpine zone are shrinking; where there was once ice, now there is green life. This process, analogous to the movement of vegetation towards the poles, is one direct manifestation of climate change. In the highest moiuntains of the world, these changes will fundamentally alter the ecosystem that we have become familiar with over the last few millennia.
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Heritage
The Wallace Line: Where Kangaroo Meets Monkey
The region of islands, Wallacea is named after the pioneering ecologist and geographer Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), one of the titans of 19th-century British science. His observations of zoological differences to the northwest and southeast of an imaginary line through the Indonesian island of Sulawesi were part of a body of work that, alongside Charles Darwin, reinvented biology through the lens of evolution.
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Environment
Extreme Salt
The arid conditions thieve from a salt lake until all that is left is an alien landscape, a lifeless plain punctuated with saturated puddles. Workers toting baskets wade into the shallows. They are collecting salt, essential to the human diet, to medicine and even to the production of fertilisers and explosives.
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Culture
Megasapiens
Teeming with activity and gleaming with a million lights is the megasapien, a city so populous it has become a world hub for trade, for culture or for religion. Rome was the first city to attain megasapien status, and today metropolitans number in the millions, but each city is unique.
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Environment
Tardigrada
Water bear is the friendlier name for a tiny creature so resilient it is able to survive in winter ice and the deepest of oceans.
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Environment
Diversity within diversity
The geometric form of pollen – the male part of the higher plants – is as strikingly beautiful as the plants from which they come.
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Environment
The False Scorpion
Looking somewhere in between a spider, a lobster and a roach, the pseudoscorpion is the stuff of nightmares.
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