Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Explorer Albert Yu-Min Lin

Conjuring Genghis Khan: Explorer Albert Yu-Min Lin

Picture the young explorer, standing in his StarCAVE, searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan. Picture the world around him, the wilderness stretching away in all directions. Picture him stooping to inspect some rocks near his feet, rocks that together form a suspiciously tidy rectangle, a rectangle that stands out for its orderliness amid the surrounding chaos of green lichen and gray talus. Picture him making a note to himself, then turning toward a faraway peak topped by an ancient shrine and launching himself toward it at several hundred miles an hour.

It’s an illusion, of course. The StarCAVE, this five-walled Cave Automated Virtual Environment, is a trickster, a dream-bringer. It squats in an earthquake-proof room in a laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, and allows its users to immerse themselves in huge three-dimensional projections of computer-generated molecules or architectural CAD blueprints or, as now, high-resolution satellite imagery of northern Mongolia. The explorer squats to examine pixels, not rocks, and when he flies away, he’s standing still. None of this is real.

Except for the explorer.

He’s as real as it gets. Read the story and watch the video >>

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Three weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Go Green: Eco-Voyagers Take on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

And the award for green cause of the year goes to . . . the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After decades of anonymity, the floating trash pile located midway between California and Hawaii had a breakout 2009—luring news crews, a trio aboard a raft made of junk, a zero-impact rower, and some hipsters from Vice magazine. Oh, and it was featured on Oprah. But most of the coverage (even you, Oprah) failed to ask one rather important question: Now that we know it’s out there, what do we do about it?

Field Notes: Whitewater and Monster Fish on Brazil's "River of Doubt"

I’m in Cacoal, Brazil, with National Geographic explorers Zeb Hogan (left), the world's foremost megafish expert, and Trip Jennings (right), an accomplished kayaker and filmmaker. Located 130 miles east of the Bolivian border, the town is just a few hours' drive from the where we’ll launch the first-ever expedition to study the aquatic life in the Rio Roosevelt, once known as the River of Doubt, tomorrow morning. If we're lucky, we'll get to document some of the huge fish Teddy Roosevelt described during his 1914 exploration.

—Text by Kyle Dickman; Photograph by Adams Mills Elliott

Meet the Adventurers of the Year: The Cove Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos

Last week we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Behind Enemy Lines

If there is an oceanic equivalent to Fort Knox, it would be the cove outside the town of Taiji on Japan’s Honshu Island. For years, 24-hour patrols, razor wire fences, and a near-vertical landscape all conspired to keep a dark secret: Each fall, Japanese fishermen gathered there to corral and slaughter hundreds of dolphins for meat. No foreign activist had ever witnessed the carnage up close. Which is precisely why Louie Psihoyos showed up.

In 2005, Psihoyos, a former National Geographic photographer and budding filmmaker, decided to infiltrate the melee. To aid his mission, he assembled one of the most unique film crews in history. Continue reading this story >>

Relics Recovered: A Pair of World-Class Climbers Goes Where Archaeologists Can't

“The challenges were daunting,” says Pete Athans of scaling a set of crumbling cliffs—more mud than rock—for the benefit of science. Last summer, the seven-time Everest summiter co-led a National Geographic expedition to Mustang, in north-central Nepal, to explore mysterious man-made cave systems carved 700 feet high into the cliffsides. “At times we were climbing what looked like overhanging drip sand castles,” Athans says. “We’d kick at a feature that we thought was a massive boulder, only to watch it collapse and fall in a cloud of sand and dust.” Locals have long reported seeing old manuscripts fluttering out of one cave, but they never had the means to explore it. The redoubt was simply too high up and the rock too unstable.

Best New Trips in the World: Exploring Laos's Northern Hill Country

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Laos. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

Laos: An Off-Limits Jungle

Traveling in Laos has always meant either a quick jaunt to Luang Prabang (the former royal capital city) or a monthlong expedition into terrain that wasn’t always worth the trip—think mosquitoes and a hothouse climate. But a new lodge in Laos’s hill country, north of Luang Prabang, is ushering in a fresh era of tourism. Reachable via the Ou River, Muang La Resort and its fleet of powerboats have transformed what was once a multiday water taxi ride to the region into a five-hour cruise. Guests can book rooms directly with Muang La or leave the planning to Asia Transpacific Journeys, the first (and so far, only) outfitter to run trips here.

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Laos"

Elephants or Sharks? Pick Which Young Explorer Gets NG Funding

We don't normally advocate for armchair adventures over the real thing, but when the National Geographic Channel's Expedition Week starts up November 15th, we highly recommend a snagging a front row seat. You'll be searching for Amazon headshrinkers and tagging great white sharks...from the comforts of your living room. And, for the first time, you can help pick which conservation-focused expedition National Geographic will sponsor next.

The Contenders: Filmmaker Trip Jennings and Photographer Ben Horton.

Mountaineering Takes Manhattan: Explorers Club Hosts Elite Climbers For "Mountain Stories"

On Saturday, October 17th, the Explorers Club in New York City will celebrate those individuals who have braved our planets highest peaks with "Mountain Stories,” a daylong special event featuring presentations by some of the most prominent individuals in mountaineering.

The day starts at 9:00 a.m. with a continental breakfast and coffee followed by a series of presentations from Robert Anderson, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, Ken Kamler, MD, Graham Bowley, Freddie Wilkinson and Janet Bergman, and Kevin Mahoney. A full lunch is served at noon and the day closes with a book signing and cocktail party at five o’clock, which provides an opportunity for attendees to meet with the speakers.

The event is open to the public and held at the Explorers Club's historic headquarters in New York City which is located at 46 East 70th Street. This “not for profit” event is $30 for adults and $25 for students.

Update: Expedition Findings Predict Arctic Summer Ice Gone in 20 Years

Last summer, Arctic adventurer Pen Hadow led the Caitlin Ice Survey on a scientific expedition to the North Pole. Their objective was to take ice core samples to measure the average thickness of the ice and add valuable data to the discourse surrounding global warming. Avid ADVENTURE readers will recall that things got a bit hairy for Hadow and co. with the team having to abandon the mission before they actually reached the pole. They may not have gotten to zero degrees longitude and latitude, but their findings, which debuted yesterday in London, have still proved highly important. Unfortunately, they have not done anything to dissuade the theory that the Earth is rapidly getting warmer.

TV Alert: NG Oceanographer Sylvia Earle Tonight on the Colbert Report

Watch Stephen Colbert joust with oceanographer Sylvia Earle tonight on Comedy Central (11:30 p.m. EST). In her 62 years studying sea life, the National Geographic Explorer in Residence has spent 6,500 hours exploring life underwater. She’s the only untethered diver ever to have dropped 1,250 feet to the ocean floor (though the bulky hardsuit looked more like a killer robot than a deep sea diver).

For years, “Her Deepness,” has been the world’s leading advocate for ocean conservation. Besides teaming up with Google to launch Google Ocean, the only complete, interactive map of the planet underwater, this year she’s launched a campaign to create a global network of marine reserves to allow sea life to recover after a century of over-fishing.—By Daniel Grushkin

National Geographic ADVENTURE: When did you realize that the ocean was being badly depleted by human activity?
Sylvia Earle: It has gradually dawned on me. The attitude of infinite resources in the sea was widespread. When I started out as a scientist years ago I just wanted to study my plants and the fish and the ecosystem because they’re beautiful, and that was my passion. In hindsight, the clues were all over. Even the decline of all the big fish was obvious by the mid 1950s.