Tag archives for Russia
Kamchatka Project: Defining Success
Posted by Ford Cochran on July 7, 2010 Bryan Smith is leading a team of whitewater kayakers on a month-long expedition to Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Funded by National Geographic’s Expeditions Council, the team will be attempting several source-to-sea first descents of previously un-run rivers, plus working with a diverse team of scientists, NGOs, and locals to help show how important Kamchatka’s river…
Source to Sea: Wild Kamchatka Rivers
Posted by Ford Cochran on June 29, 2010 Bryan Smith is leading a team of whitewater kayakers on a month-long expedition to Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Funded by National Geographic’s Expeditions Council, the team will be attempting several source-to-sea first descents of previously un-run rivers, plus working with a diverse team of scientists, NGOs, and locals to help show how important Kamchatka’s river…
Posted by Many apologies for the long radio silence. This month I was taking a break from space and immersing myself in the wonders of climate modeling at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. I did, however, get to feed my astro-addiction during the evening hours with a copy of Space Tourists, a 2009 Swiss documentary…
Posted by As we head into the Chinese Year of the Tiger (starting on February 14), here’s a bit of encouraging news: All 13 tiger-range countries have pledged to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger. NGS stock photo by Michael Nichols Populations of wild tigers have declined to…
The last remaining population of Siberian tigers has likely declined significantly due to poaching and habitat loss, The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said today. A report released by the Siberian Tiger Monitoring Program, which is coordinated by WCS in association with Russian governmental and non-governmental organizations, suggests a 40 percent decline in the cat’s numbers…
The coniferous forest that wraps around the subarctic latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere offers the world’s best opportunity to apply conservation as a climate change strategy, according to a report released today. The boreal forest, as it is called, must be preserved because it is holding vast amounts of carbon in and under its trees, and also because it offers…
The first two Soyuz launchers have left Russia for the Guiana Space Center, Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, Arianespace said today. Each voyage will carry two Soyuz 2-1a vehicles along with the accompanying systems and propellant. With Arianespace’s planned mission rate of two to four Soyuz flights per year, it expects to perform one or…
This satellite image of Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in Russia’s Arctic, launches a new ad hoc series on this blog I will call Earth from Space. Look out for regular updates for unusual, beautiful, educational, newsworthy images released by public and commercial space agencies. I will be looking particularly for images that highlight the special…
Good news for polar bears, walruses, caribou: Russia will create a new 3.7 million-acre (1.5 million-hectare) park in the Arctic, a central area for the Barents and Kara Sea polar bear populations, WWF said today. NGS photo of polar bear in the Russian Arctic by Gordon Wiltsie Announcing the park, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said…
Great British Bustards! That’s how The Great Bustard Group, a charity striving to re-establish a self-sustaining population of the world’s heaviest flying bird in the UK, greeted this week’s news that years of hard work had paid off with the sighting of hatchlings in the wild. Photo courtesy The Great Bustard Group “For the first time…
—Image courtesy NASA Thankfully this is not a very odd sort of suppository. This is a squirrel monkey called Miss Baker, sitting in a NASA bio-capsule. On May 28, 1959, Miss Baker and a rhesus monkey named Able became the first primates to survive a trip into outer space. Both monkeys flew onboard a Jupiter…
NGS photo of Amur tigers by Michael Nichols Loggers in Russia’s Far East increasingly are cutting down Korean cedar pine, raising concerns that the endangered Siberian (or Amur) tiger could lose critical habitat and its prey could lose a major food source, the conservation charity WWF said today. “Under pressure from the ongoing economic crisis,…
After shaking off the daze induced by family, bubbly, and the vast amounts of tamales that accompany my winter holidays, I have washed up on the shores of Long Beach, California, where almost 2,500 astronomers are gathered for the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The biggest astro-nerd fest of the year is even…
On November 20, 1998, a bus-size hunk of electronics poetically named Zarya, Russian for “dawn,” blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The module was the first piece of the International Space Station, which after ten years and 29 construction deliveries is the largest spacecraft ever built, comparable in size to a five-bedroom house—albeit…
Surprise! This is Victoria again… Many thanks to Stephen for diving right into the blogosphere with us—his debut here is a totally rad behind-the-scenes look at National Geographic‘s space special issue, which blows me right out of the digital water. Not to interrupt his groove, but I do have one more thing to share before…
