12.3.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marcia for Radio I, and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated October twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher. As a reminder, Radio
I is a reading service intended for people who are
blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult to
read printed material. Please join me now for the continuation

(00:22):
of the article I began last time, entitled how an
American icon Helped Save Egypt's ancient Temples by Kate Story.
Thanks in part to Jacqueline Kennedy's powerful private lobbying ramses,
the second and the rest of the Abu symbol statues
reign safely again in southern Egypt, ready to survive another

(00:42):
three thousand years. In honor of the support fostered by
the First Lady, Egypt offered the U s the smaller
Temple of Dendur, a first century b c. Shrine also
saved from the Asswan High Dam, which is now I
display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Ultimately,
Jfky never got to see the end result of his
wife's work. He was assassinated before the relocation of Abu

(01:05):
symbol even began. To day, Jacqueline's preservation efforts in the US,
from the White House to New York's Grand Central Terminal
are widely lauded, but her contributions in Egypt have been
largely overlooked. However, her daughter Caroline once remarked that her
mother felt that of equal importance to her White House

(01:26):
restoration were her far less well known efforts as First
Lady to save Abu Symbol. While there was little public
recognition of the role she played, Jacqueline was instrumental in
securing funding for a venture that helped set the stage
for future conservation endeavors across the globe. The work done
to save Abu Symbol was a catalyst for UNESCO's World

(01:48):
Heritage Initiative that now safeguards thousands of notable landmarks, from
the ancient ruins of Cambodia's angor Wat to the water
channels of Venice. That campaign was very symbolic in many ways,
says May Cheer, UNESCO's chief of the Arab States Unit
for World Heritage. It established a common standard to identify

(02:10):
and protect cultural and natural properties that are considered to
be of significance for all humanity. Next article The world's
tallest mountain, it might not be what you think. By
Gordy McGraw's a new approach to how we measure mountains
is reigniting some long simmering debates and perhaps creating a
new pecking order for the planet's most impressive peaks. At

(02:34):
eleven thirty a m. On May twenty nine, nineteen fifty three,
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stepped onto the summit of
Mount Everest. Affixed to Norgay's ice acts were four small
flags of Nepal, the United Nations, Great Britain in India,
and as the Sherpa mountaineer held the axe above his
head under a clear blue sky, the flags flapped wildly

(02:56):
in fierce winds. In the thirty years prior, at least
seventy five others have tried to reach that summit, more
than a dozen dying in the attempt, and Hillary and
Norgay's successful ascent is still considered one of history's most
monumental feats. The reason is obvious right because in eighteen
fifty six British surveyors declared Evarice the planet's tallest peak,

(03:18):
the roof of the world Earth's most impressive mountain, but
What if it's none of those things. What if our
understanding of a mountain's scale, what height itself means, and
how much it matters, is more arbitrary than we realize.
For one, it might change travelers, sight seeing plants, or
point peak baggers in whole new directions. Then there's the

(03:41):
matter of reallocating bragging rights. How to measure mountains, it
turns out, has been subject to challenges and alternative ways
of thinking for about as long as humans have been
climbing them. And the latest comes from a young mathematician
with a whole new metric that can once again alter
our way of looking at the roof of the world.

(04:01):
It's called jut its inventor Kai Zou was a nineteen
year old on a trip to California's Eastern Sierra when
it dawned on him that the height a mountain rises
above sea level isn't the most interesting thing about it.
The Sierras wowed him with how abruptly they seemed to
rise from the valley floor, and Chu, then, a math
and computer science major at Yale University, thought there must

(04:24):
be a way to quantify that sort of grandeur. The
trip inspired him to do two things. First, he worked
out an equation that, roughly speaking, takes the height of
a summit above any given point and reduces that number
based on the angle of view. Then he used Google
Earth Engine to pinpoint the one spot for any given
mountain where that value is greatest. He called that maximized

(04:49):
value a mountain's JUT, and it took Google's platform less
than a week to compute it for some two hundred
thousand mountains. Chu learned it, launched a website to share
his new system, and JUT has since earned fans and
sparked debate over what it is that makes a mountain matter. Everest,
at twenty nine thousand, thirty two feet above sea level,

(05:11):
has a meager seven thousand, two hundred ninety feet of JUT.
Ju's system ranks it only the world's forty sixth most
impressive peak. Meanwhile, on Apurna Phong, also in the Himalaya,
tops out at nearly four thousand feet above Everest, but
with eleven thousand, one hundred ninety four feet of JUT,
it's ostensibly Earth's most impressive mountain face. Chu is only

(05:35):
the latest in a long line of scientists and adventures
to challenge conventional wisdom about orometry, the science of mountain measurement.
In the fourth century BC, the Greek thinger thinker Diacercus
is said to have used a crude surveying instrument called
a dioptra to measure the Hellenic peaks. The eleventh century

(05:56):
Persian scholar l Biruni used trigonometry to measure mountains more accurately.
That was still the method when European explorers started poking
around the Andes hundreds of years later. At twenty thousand,
five hundred sixty one feet above sea level, Ecuador's Chimborazo
was thought to be Earth's highest mountain when German naturalist

(06:17):
Alexander von Humboldt climbed it in eighteen o two. Later,
Sejama in Bolivia took the title, then Aconcagua in Argentina.
It was also in eighteen o two that the British
launched the seventy year Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, which

(06:38):
revealed to surveyors that the Himalaya loomed larger than any
other mountain. Range crews hacked through jungles toting massive angle
measuring instruments called theod theodolites, some weighing more than one
thousand pounds, and established a network of survey stations that
stretched sixteen hundred miles. Their labors lay the gas work

(07:00):
for modern methods of measuring Earth's surface. George Everest, who
led the effort for twenty years, probably never saw the
peak later named for him, but he did higher. Radanaf
Sik sikh Dar, the Indian mathematician, is credited with calculating
Mount Ephras height, putting it above kanan Chenjuga, one of

(07:22):
several Himalayan peaks briefly thought to be the world's highest.
Everett's claim is held, but as mountaineering grew more popular
and competitive in the twentieth century, debates flared up over
what truly defines a mountain's greatness. Terrace Moore, a well
known mountaineer, made a case in the nineteen sixties that
because of the planet's equatorial bulge, a mountain might better

(07:44):
be measured from the center of the Earth than from
sea level. Chimborazo, he noted, would take back the title,
rising higher than Everest does above the Earth's main radius.
Beginning in the nineteen eighties, some took to privileging the
concept of prominence, a measure of a peak's height relative
to surrounding terrain. Alaska's Mount mc kinley and Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro,

(08:10):
rising dramatically above their surroundings, are among the most prominent peaks,
But don't crack the top one hundred for elevation above
sea level. Jew took inspiration fri jut from another esoteric
metric known as omni directional relief and steepness, devised in
two thousand two by a mathematician and climber duo. It's

(08:32):
a complex formula for quantifying how visually imposing a peak
is mostly useful full for those looking to bag impressive ascents.
Here's a look at how these measures and others reshuffle
the deck of Earth's mightiest mountains. Think you know the
roof of the world. You might be surprised. Have we
been measuring mountains all wrong? The process isn't as simple

(08:54):
as it might seem. Sure, the summit of Everest is
indisputably Earth's highest point above sea level, But what's so
special about sea level measure a mountain? In other ways?
There are plenty to choose from, including the newly devised
metric of jut and you'll find a whole range of
candidates for the title of lo D's peak. Turns out

(09:14):
there's room at the top. The crux of the dispute.
We tend to agree where the summits are, but we
are to measure up from Does sea level make sense
when a peak is far from the coast measure from
the base, some might say, Except that most mountains are
surrounded by complex terrain with differing reliefs on all sides,
and there is no agreed upon method for determining a

(09:36):
mountain's base. To gauge a mountain's stature, geographers and mountaineers
might use one of a several system. How the giants
stack up. Each of these mountains shown to scale with
one another with respect to elevation above sea level might
make a plausible claim to being the world's tallest. It
all depends on what your measuring and where you begin methods.

(10:03):
Rakaposchi largest continuously sloping face. Other mountains rise higher than
Pakistan's Rakaposchi in the Karakorum range, but over longer distances
and more gradually, its claim to the largest base to
peak rise owes to its sheer north base, which looms
some nineteen thousand feet over the Hunza Valley. Mount Everest

(10:25):
highest above sea level. The summit of Everest occupies the
so called death zone, where oxygen is too scarce to
sustain human life, but since the mountain rises from the
already sky high Tibetan Plateau, its height above its base
may seem less impressive. Chimborozo farthest from Earth's center, this

(10:45):
dormant Ecuadorian volcano sits nearly on top of the planet's
equatorial bulge, Earth's widest point, but while distant from the core,
it doesn't even crack the top thirty in the Andes
for elevation above sea level. Sera akha Acancagua most prominent,
with nothing higher for comparison, Everest winds prominence on a technicality,

(11:08):
but really it's this peak in Argentina's Andes, isolated in
its grandeur, since the closest higher peak is more than
ten thousand miles away, Mount McKinley Dinali, highest off a
flat base. Admirers of North America's highest peak above sea
level have argued for it as a highest base to
peak contender on the strength of its seemingly well defined base.

(11:30):
The mountain rises roughly seventeen thousand, two hundred feet from
low level Tundra Nanga Parbat. Most omnidirectional relief and steepness.
Many consider this mountain in Pakistan the hardest to climb
among the world's fourteen peaks that crest eight thousand meters
above sea level. Nicknamed Killer Mountain, it tops the list

(11:52):
for o rs because it rises so high and so
steeply on every side on a most Jut, the Nepalese
Massif's unclimbed southwest face rises from the Kali Gandaki River
valley to a peak known as Annapurna Fong or Veraja

(12:13):
Sea car. Its vertical rise and breathtaking steepness make it,
by the measure of Jut, the world's most impressive mountain face.
Five ways to measure a mountain elevation above sea level.
Mean sea level is one base, but if you're gazing
at a summit from any place other than the coast,
it likely means that much of a peak's height is

(12:35):
measured beneath your feet and not above you. Advantages mountains
atop plateaus, disadvantages coastal ranges. Two distance from the center
of the Earth. Our planet is in a perfect sphere
Centrifugal force from its rotation causes a bulge at the equator.
A mountain rising from this bulge sits up to thirteen

(12:55):
miles farther from Earth's center than a peak near the
poles with a similar elevation above sea level Advantage equatorial
peaks disadvantage summits nearer the poles. Three topographic prominence, popular
with mountaineers. Prominence measures a mountain's relative height above its surroundings.

(13:16):
How much elevation must you lose while descending a peak
before you can begin climbing a taller one. That's prominence
with a low point between them, known as the key's saddle.
Advantage Isolated mountains high points on massifs disadvantage peaks not
far from higher ones. Four. Omnidirectional relief and steepness o

(13:38):
R S, most easily understood as measuring the impressiveness of
the view from the top of a mountain. O RS
relies on a complex formula that averages slope angles and
height values between a summit and all points in all
directions surrounding it. The formula gives more weight Two topography
nearest to the peak advantage. Mountains with high steep faces

(14:02):
on all sides disadvantages more gradually rising terrain mountains with
inconsistent relief. Five jut a measure of how dramatically a
mountain's most impressive face rises up for every point surrounding
a summit. A mathematical equation assigns a score based on
both the vertical rise and the steepness of the angle

(14:24):
between them. The one spot where that angle reduced height
is greatest becomes the base. The high score itself is
the jut advantage. Mountains at least one high steep face
disadvantage more gradually rising terrain. Y on A Purna rises
above the high point of the multi peaked Annapurna Massif

(14:45):
in the Himalaya of Nepal. Is the summit known as
on Apurna one the world's tenth tallest above sea level,
but the sub peak known as Anapura Pong has the
planet's highest JUT, a number that factors in both height
and steepness to gage how impressively a mountain rises above
its surroundings. A few key points to help explain the

(15:06):
newly invented metric a mountain's base isn't necessarily a valley floor.
For every point surrounding a peak, JUT uses a formula
to determine a value called angle reduced height, the vertical
rise between point and peak diminished proportionately to the gradualness
of the slope. The point that maximizes that value is

(15:27):
designated as the base. It can be thought of as
the most impressive viewpoint. On a porna one is higher
but still has lower jut. The summit shares a base
with on aporna fang, meaning the same point maximizes the
angle reduced height for both, but since the angle down
to its gentler on a porna one's jut is lower.

(15:47):
No other faces matter since not measures. Since JUT measures
only the most impressive one, steepness and height both matter.
JUT aims to measure a peak's height and the abruptness
of its rise. An observer farther down the valley would
look toward these peaks at a somewhat flatter, less dramatic angle.

(16:09):
If a mountain has a jut of ten thousand feet,
that's meant to suggest that its face rises as impressively
as a vertical cliff ten thousand feet high. Next, ice
hockey is flourishing in Nairobi by Neha Wadakar. There's only
one rink in the country and it's tiny, but the

(16:30):
Kenyan Kenya Ice Lions have their sights set on the Olympics.
Nairobi's Penari Hotel sits alongside a highway between the city
center and Jomo Kanyata International Airport. On the second floor,
across from a Chinese restaurant and next to a movie theater,
is a small skating rink that serves as the home
base for the Kenya Ice Lions, the only ice hockey

(16:53):
team in Equatorial Africa. On a recent Wednesday, the arena
echoed with the thud of hockey sticks and bodies colliding
with the boards. From the bench, players shouted at their
teammates in Swakili as they faced off in a five
a side scrimmage on a rink just a quarter of
the size of a regulation National Hockey League rink. A

(17:14):
vast divide exists in Kenya between the rich and poor,
but here in Nairobi, ice hockey is helping to bridge
the gap. The team is made up of people from
very humble backgrounds and people from the worldlier side of life,
says thirty year old Ice Lions captain Benjamin Mimboro, who
works as an architect and construction manager. Many of the

(17:34):
team members are still students, some are unemployed. The sport
has also been a lifeline for players like the twenty
one year old Chumbana Mikiza Muja Sini, who grew up
in one of the city's harsh harshest slums. None of
that matters on the ice, No one cares about who
came from where, Mimburro says. Last year, Kenya became the

(17:56):
fifth African nation and just the second Sub Saharan nation
to join the International Ice Hockey Federation i i h F,
the global professional body for the sport. It took nearly
a decade for the Ice Lions to achieve that recognition.
The team began informerly in twenty sixteen when a few
young Kenyons working at the rink as skating instructors grew

(18:18):
tired of just watching Western expats play hockey and decided
to give it a go themselves. Soon they were recruiting
players from Nairobi's rollerblading community, sourcing jerseys another apparel from
the city's secondhand markets and donning a patchwork of donated gear.
It was super cold and I couldn't control my skates
in Burroughs says, as an African, the closest I ever

(18:40):
came to ice hockey was mostly Christmas movies on TV.
It wasn't long before the field good story of hockey
on the Equators started to spread. In twenty eighteen, an
executive at the Chinese multinational company Ali Baba learned about
the team through Facebook and flew some of the players
to South Africa to film a television at ad featuring

(19:00):
the tagline ice Hockey and Kenya, No Dream is Too Big.
The TV spot raised the team's profile, but the Ice
Lions still had no one to play against until later
that same year. Canadian restaurant chain Tim Hortons flew the
squad to Canada for training and filmed a documentary in
which the players received full sets of gear and Kenyon jerseys,

(19:22):
met ice met met hockey legends Sidney Crosby and Nathan McKinnon,
and competed against a Canadian team. For some of the Kenyans,
it was their first time leaving Africa. The players came
home determined to build up Kenya's hockey ecosystem. Today, retired
Canadian pro Sarroya Tinker is helping the Ice Lions launch

(19:43):
a women's league, and the team has begun a Saturday
youth clinic to develop a pipeline of talent for future generations. Currently,
as many as seventy kids show up for weekend practices.
The squad is coached by Canadian Tim Colby, who spent
ten years at the helm of minor league hockey teams
in Ottawa before he moved to Kenya. Unsurprisingly, Colby says

(20:04):
the group's greatest hurdle comes down to the cost of
ice time in Nairobi. At one hundred dollars an hour,
it's too expensive and the rank is too small. On
top of that, the Ice Lions, both players and staff
are all volunteers and it's tough to run a full
time professional sports team on a volunteer basis. Colby says.
Despite these challenges, the Ice Lions hope to take part

(20:26):
in the first ever African Nations Cup, tentatively scheduled for
next June in Cape Town, South Africa, and they plan
to work their way up through the many tiered IIHF
World championship divisions with the goal of eventually qualifying for
the Olympics. Nothing is impossible, says Boro. Next, what we

(20:47):
get wrong about the world's most maligned map. The Mercader
projection wildly distorts the globe, but that's what makes it useful.
Maps based on it are used daily by millions of people.
Close your eyes and picture a map of the world.
You've likely brought to mind a distorted vision of the
Earth based on the work of sixteenth century geographer Gerardis Mercador,

(21:10):
the Flemish cartographer devised a projection the technique for representing
the three dimensional Earth and two dimensions that underpins the
most ubiquitous map of the modern era. Nearly five hundred
years after its creation, the chart still adorns classroom walls,
and a digital version called web Mercador is used in
almost all the navigation applications in our smartphones. But the

(21:33):
Mercadi projection also has its critics, who bemoaned the way
it distorts reality. Greenland is not that big, Russia isn't
larger than Africa. Here's the thing. The geographer wasn't trying
to create the perfect map, just a useful one for sailors.
Until Mercader, many world maps had lines of longitude that
curved like parentheses. These maps featured relatively precise depictions of

(21:57):
land masses as geographers knew them, but made navigation a nightmare.
Because the maps showed a flat representation of the Earth
and didn't accurately account for direction, mariners had to constantly
check their bearing. To remedy this, Mercader portrayed the globe
as a flattened cylinder, drawing lines of latitude and longitude
that intersected at ninety degree angles. The result, according to

(22:22):
Marc Monmonier, a professor emeritus of geography at Syracuse University,
was as simple as it was revolutionary. You could find
where you were, where you wanted to go, and draw
state straight line connecting those two points. These room lines
acted as a kind of set in and forget it
course for sailors. Mercader was well aware that the right

(22:44):
angles that made his map useful for navigation also made
it somewhat inaccurate, distorting the relative size of the land masses.
In the past few decades, critics of the Mercader projection
have asserted that these distortions fueled colonially and ethnocentric attitudes.
Geographers have long proposed alternative projections that address its flaws.

(23:07):
For example, National Geographic often uses the Eckert for projection,
which distorts the shape of land masses as well as
the angles between latitude and longitude, but accurately represents the
relative area of the continents. All maps have things they
do well and other things they might not do as well,
says Monmnier. You can't have a map that does everything

(23:29):
well unless you have a globe, and a globe doesn't
fit in your pocket the way your smartphone does. The
Web Mercader map on your phone takes the best qualities
of its predecessor, but the software charts a course for you.
While our operating systems and modes of transportation have received
significant upgrades since Mercado's time, our maps remain purposely antiquated.

(23:53):
This article by Ashley Stimpson Mercado's masterpiece. This map revolutionized
house sailors, charted courses, and made long distance navigation easier.
Mercader used a copperplate engraving process and a printing press
for the map's eighteen panels, which together measure seventy eight
by fifty one inches. Only three originals have survived getting

(24:16):
a new standard. Before Mercado's game changing map, navigators typically
hugged the coastline or used Portelan charts graphic representations of
written instructions that showed an estimated direction when crossing the
high seas. This new system provided a reliable tool for
plotting direction over great distances. Pal Mercader combined accurate coordinates

(24:39):
with precise direction to maintain features, shapes, and accurately depict
the angles between latitude and longitude. Mercader proportionally stretched the
distance between lines of latitude, but kept the spacing among
lines of longitude. The same straight lines, so called room lines,
emanate from these cunure of compass arcs in the left corners.

(25:02):
Navigators would use a compass to find their direction, trace
the easily measurable room lines, and then maintain a set heading.
To get from Lisbon, Portugal to Purunambuco Busil, mariners would
plot a straight line between waypoints and use a compass
to find the heading they would need to follow. This process,
combined with rudimentary time measurement, speed tracking, and observation of

(25:26):
the suns and sun and stars, would help them navigate
more efficiently. Next television, the plane, a Cesna Succeeder, went
down in a stretch of Colombian rainforests that might have
challenged even the most prepared jungle trekkers. The crash killed
the pilot and two passengers, including Magdalena makutney be a

(25:47):
member of the hi Tooto community who was relocating to
Bogata from her home on indigenous reserve land in the
Colombian Amazon. The only survivors mukutis eleven month old baby
and three other children age thirteen, nine and five. What
followed is an incredible story of resilience and hope told

(26:08):
by National Geographic explorer Chai Vasarheli and Jimmy Chin, along
with Juan Camillo Cruz in the new documentary Lost in
the Jungle. Just as inspiring as the mccoutney's children's courage
is the unprecedented rescue effort coordinated by the Columbian military
and searchers from indigenous communities groups long at odds briefly

(26:30):
united in Common Purpose, coming to the National Geographic and
Disney Plus starting September twelfth Czech local listings. Next, the
Sanctuary of l Carumbolo. Recent excavations in the place where
the l Carumbolo Treasure was found in nineteen fifty eight
have brought to light the remains of a sanctuary that

(26:51):
combined activities related to both religion and commercial exchange. First
erected by the Phoenicians at the end of the ninth century,
DC was laid, enlarged, and remodeled several times. The walls
were made of plastered adobe and the floors were made
of red clay. It is believed that one of the
rooms was dedicated to the cult of a start and

(27:13):
another two balls. In the latter, an altar in the
shape of a stretched out bullhide was found, a feature
common to all Tartisian places of worship horse Hakatoumbe. In
twenty sixteen, archaeologists excavating the Casas del Turanyellow site in Glariga, Spain,
uncovered a stairway leading to a courtyard where they found

(27:34):
the skeletal remains of more than fifty animals, mostly horses, mules,
and donkeys. Early theories speculated that the animals had all
been killed at once in a dramatic sacrifice before Tartisians
abandoned the site, but a twenty twenty three study revealed
that the yard was regularly used for mass animal sacrifice
for several years. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine

(27:58):
for today. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening,
keep found listening, and have a great day.