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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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
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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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.
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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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
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
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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 for today. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, keep found listening, and have a great day.
