Category: National Geographic

National Geographic October 2015, Part 2

Lifeblood, by Robert Draper, photographs by Pascal Maitre

In this article, Draper and Maitre take the Congo River from Mbandaka to Kisangani (interestingly, Firefox’s spell-check likes “Kisangani.”).  This is not where the journey was supposed to start.  It was supposed to start in Kinshasa, at the lower edge of the navigable Congo River.  However, the first boat they had paid to take, the Kwame Express, ended up not working out (to say the least) so Draper and Maitre arranged alternative transportation on a barge, which required that they fly from Kinshasa to Mbandaka (my fingers totally don’t want to type “Mbandaka.” I think it’s the “Mb.”).

We meet some of the people on the barge and see their motivations for traveling this way and watch people along the river take smaller boats, called pirogues, out to the barge to buy goods, some of which are declared, but much of which is black market merchandise.

When they arrive in Kisangani, Draper and Maitre take a day trip up the Lomami River, one of the tributaries of the Congo.

It is hard to see the passage of time in this article, unfortunately, but at the beginning of the journey, Draper tells us that it is February, and they spend the day on the Lomami in November, so the trip took eight months (a number verified by a confusingly worded caption on a photograph of the Kwame Express).

I know that I said once that I want to go “everywhere,” but after reading this article, I think that traveling up the Congo River on a barge has now been moved pretty close to the bottom of the list.  If I end up with the time and money to do this after pretty much everywhere else (including most of Africa), I’ll consider it.

Lure of the Lost City, by Douglas Preston, photographs by Dave Yoder

The “Lost City” of the title is a reference to the Ciudad Blanca, a mythical city that is rumored to have once existed somewhere in the Mosquitia region of Honduras.  For a long time, the consensus of historians and archaeologists was that there were no cities at all in that region.  However, the imaging technique known as LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) showed that there was an area in the rainforest that was consistent with the markings of an ancient city.  The city that they found was a large one, with terraced fields in its outskirts and ten public plazas within the city.

And what the archaeologists found was amazing.  Apparently when the city was abandoned, no one ever disturbed it again.  Most of the buildings had been biodegradable and they are gone now, but there are a large number of stone artifacts that were found in near perfect condition.  And, to archaeologists, more important than the artifacts is the context — the location where the artifacts were found and how that location relates to the locations of other artifacts.  If I am reading this article correctly, the context of these artifacts is perfect.

National Geographic October 2015, Part 1

Mystery Man, by Jamie Shreeve, photographs by Robert Clark

In 2015, Lee Berger received a great deal of publicity for the discovery of a new relative of homo sapiens that has been named homo naledi.  Part of the publicity was because of the finding and part was because of the way that Berger went about the investigation.

The bones which later became homo naledi were found in 2013 in the dinaledi chamber of a South African cave system called Rising Star by cavers named Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker.  The word “naledi” means “star” in Sotho.  “Dinaledi” is Sotho for “Chamber of Stars.”  The cavers were aware that Berger was looking for fossils, so when they found the bones in the dinaledi chamber, they brought them to Berger’s attention.

And this is where the controversy comes in. Berger went to Facebook to recruit credentialed scientists who were small of stature.  The way to the dinaledi chamber involves two passageways less than 10 inches (25.4 cm) wide.  The six most qualified applicants were all female. Then, rather than keeping the discovery under his hat for years while he decided how to classify them, he crowd-sourced the classification.  Berger had apparently around 50 scientists in to the site to help him classify the fossils.

None of the scientists had seen anything like these fossils.  Some of the teeth looked like modern human teeth, others looked primitive, and all of the other groups had the same experiences.  The hands had modern carpals and metacarpals, but the phlanges were curved, and so on.

Berger then added to the controversy by publishing in an electronic journal within two years of the find, rather than, again, sitting and waiting and publishing in a print journal.

This article made me kind of uncomfortable, because I am mildly claustrophobic.  It’s not pathological or anything — I can visit submarines and I climbed the Statue of Liberty all the way to the crown with no problem in 1988.  But the thought of having only eight inches of clearance between me and freedom made me kind of tense while reading this article.

Wild Heart of Sweden, by Don Belt, photographs by Orsolya and Erlind Haarberg

Wild Heart of Sweden is about the Laponian Area World Heritage Site, one of the largest wilderness areas in Europe.  Laponia is in the home region of the Sami people (formerly known as the Lapps).  We follow Belt as he visits this region in company with the owner of a wilderness outfitting company and his summer intern (who is herself part Sami).

And, once again, we get the beautiful photographs of the Haarbergs, whose work we last saw either two years or four days ago, depending on your perspective. When I saw that first photograph on pages 58 and 59, I thought, “Hey! That looks like that husband-and-wife team from last issue.” And I was right.  I didn’t do it intentionally at all. It just worked out that way.

National Geographic November 13, 2013, Part 2

The War for Nigeria, by James Verini, Photographs by Ed Kashi

As a pharmacy technician in my day job, I have worked with several of the around 6,000 Nigerian pharmacists working in the United States. So, for me, Nigeria is at least a little more than just a blob on a map to me.

For many in the United States, though, the last time Nigeria made much of an impact on popular culture was with the kidnapping of the girls from Chibok school by members of Boko Haram, a group who want to create an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria.  To this end, they have been, performing acts of violence against the population of northern Nigeria, targeting Christians in particular, but any Muslims that don’t support the Boko Haram agenda are targets as well.

The War for Nigeria is about the actions of Boko Haram in 2013.  We begin with the bombing of a bus station in Kano, the second-largest city in Nigeria. We then go to a local dispute between Christians and Muslims in rural Nigeria.  No one is sure where the dispute began, one villager says that it is based in the death of a cow, but the Christians in the village claim that they are being victimized by Boko Haram.

We then go into the history of Kano, which had been a caliphate before the British took over, and whose emir had been kept on as a sort of religious leader/figurehead.  There is still an emir in Kano, and while Verini doesn’t get to meet the then-current emir, Ado Bayero (who passed away in 2014 and has been succeeded by his great-nephew Mahammadu Sanusi II, who was apparently a banker before he became a religious leader), he does get to have a look around the emir’s palace.

In the process of writing this post, I stumbled across an assertion that “Boko Haram” is a reference to being opposed to western education.  And so I did some digging and found that apparently the Hausa word “boko” is a reference to “ilimin boko,” which means “fake education,” and means the western-style education brought by British colonialists.  “Haram” is an Arabic word that means that something is forbidden or a sin.  As a result, “Boko Haram” carries the meaning “western education is a sin.”

Follow the Water, by Verlyn Klinkenborg, photographs by Orsolya and Erlind Haarberg

Follow the Water is about the coast of Norway.  After reading about the harrowing lives of people in northern Nigeria, Klinkenborg’s lyrical musings on traveling up the coast of Norway was refreshing, but a little jarring as well.  Let’s hope for an era in which people will be able to write such gorgeous prose about the beauty of northern Nigeria.  I may not live to see it, but someday . . . .

Follow the Water is a beautiful article, and there’s not much to say about it that could possibly improve on it, but one point made in Follow the Water is that we have now made the to-date most accurate measurement of Norway’s coast, and the current figure is 63,000 miles.  That means that if you stretched it out, Norway’s coast would go around the equator just about two and a half times.

National Geographic November 2013, Part 1

Now that I’m back earlier than 2014 in this project, I sure hope that I can remember to put what year each issue came out. This is sort of an advance apology if sometime down the line, I goof and put “2012” instead of “2011” or anything like that.

The Last Days of a Storm Chaser, by Robert Draper

The Last Days of a Storm Chaser is a very long article about the life and death of Tim Samaras, who chased tornadoes, not for the thrill, but for the opportunity to study them in hopes of better understanding them and eventually saving the lives of people in the paths of them.

We start out with the video that Samaras made of the storm in question, then go back to discuss how he came to be there on that day. Draper discusses Samaras’s research, then goes a bit into how tornadoes form. Then he goes back farther to Samaras’s childhood

Samaras was well known for being very cautious. If he didn’t think that he and his coworkers, who included his son, Paul (who died in the same tornado), could get in and back out safely, he wouldn’t even attempt to place probes in the path of the tornado.

And yet, somehow, Samaras managed to make one tragic judgment call that led to his death and the deaths of two others. Samaras was videotaping the tornado and the videotape ended three minutes before his death, so it is likely we will never know why he opted to be where he was in those last minutes. Draper suggests that perhaps they were trying to deploy probes at the time, or perhaps they were attempting to get away.

Paradise Revisited, by Cathy Newman, photographs by David Doubilet

Doubilet is not only the photographer for this article, he is also the point of view character. Doubilet visited Kimbe Bay, off the coast of Papua New Guinea “seventeen years ago,” so presumably that would be 1996. We’re never told specifically. Since then, Doubilet has longed to return, to see if the coral reef in the bay is still healthy. And it is, for the time being. With global climate change being what it is, however, there are no guarantees that the reef will stay that way.

I am unsure why this is structured like a traditional article with the writer’s name at the top, rather than like other articles that focus on the work of the photographer, where top billing is given to the photographer and the writer’s name is given at the end. Perhaps over time I will see more examples of this kind of article and I will be able to figure out the pattern.

Expanded Boundaries and Hidden Treasures, by Robert Ballard

I had the pleasure to see Robert Ballard speak in person in the late 1980s. Ballard was speaking on the JASON project, which he founded to give children a chance to work with working scientists. He is an engaging speaker, and we had a chance to actually speak with him (very briefly) one-on-one after the talk.

But I digress. Expanded Boundaries and Hidden Treasures is about the exclusive economic zone (“EEZ”), which allows countries to lay claim to undersea territory at least 200 nautical miles from their coasts (if they can prove that the continental shelf extends beyond that 200-mile mark, they can claim more than 200 nautical miles). Needless to say, landlocked countries do not qualify to have an EEZ.

Through its coastline and also its island territories, the United States has claimed an area nearly the size of the continental US through the EEZ. “Last June,” presumably June of 2012, the United States sent its exploration ships out into its EEZ to uncover the natures of both the natural and the economic resources to be found there.

National Geographic April 2014, Part 3

Wild Obsession, by Lauren Slater, photographs by Vincent J. Musi

Wild Obsession is about people who share their homes with wild animals. The cover image is of a hedgehog, but there are no hedgehogs in this article — most of the animals mentioned are large cats and things of that nature. Slater talks to some of the people who currently own wild animals, and also to those who have given their animals up.

Slater comes across fairly sympathetic to the feelings of these owners, except during one instance which Slater interprets as an attempt of a juvenile kangaroo to mate with a pig (and which the owner of the animals says is a grooming behavior), which Slater sums up with “here, in this wired enclosure, the natural order has been altered.” For some reason, this sat wrong with me. It came off as dismissive of the animals’ owner’s assessment of the situation. We never see what is happening, merely what Slater tells us has happened, for one. It also seemed judgmental. Interspecies attempts at mating do happen in the wild, after all. I’ve found stories of moose trying to mate with horses or cows and of seals trying to mate with penguins and I didn’t have to dig far to find them. The seal/penguin story was on the first page of the Google results when I searched for “interspecies mounting” and the moose/horse(cow) one was in the comments to that article. The Wikipedia article has eight footnotes relating to interspecies mating in the wild. Additionally, if species were the kind of impermeable barrier that Slater seems to imagine, we wouldn’t have the Sherpas, since their ability to withstand high altitude comes, from everything I have read, from Denisovian ancestors.

For what it’s worth, I would never consider owning a large animal. The cost of feeding it would be prohibitive, but mostly I wouldn’t consider it because it would be cruel to force a large cat to live on a quarter-acre of land in a residential neighborhood. Also, however, it could be dangerous to me, personally. About 20 years ago now, one of my cats was walking from Point A to Point C and I was at Point B. As he crossed my lap, his rear foot slipped. I still have the scar. If a 15-pound cat could do that, what could a 300-pound tiger do?

Domesticated cats and dogs are plenty for me, thanks.  I would maybe like to get a large parrot someday.  Alex has said that he’d be willing to inherit it from me.  I would, of course, only get a parrot that was born in captivity from a reputable breeder.  I would do this largely to avoid participating in animal trafficking but also so that I would know the health status of the parrot’s ancestors.

Romans in France, by Robert Kunzig, photographs by Rémi Bénali

For some reason, Romans in France starts out with an overview of waste management solutions in Rome, in which we’re told that Monte Testaccio is actually a pile of empty amphorae that were thrown out of warehouses along the Tiber. Then we move on to the meat of the article, which is about an archaeological, well, “dig” is the wrong word, and I’m not too sure about “excavation.” We’ll go with “project” beneath the waters of the Rhône in Arles, France.

In 1986, archaeologist Luc Long was dared by a friend to dive into the polluted waters of the Rhône. Long found a truck under the water, and in the driver’s side of the truck was a Roman amphora.

In 2004, the archaeologists found a Roman barge 102 feet in length. Almost a decade later, the money came along to build a home for the barge once they excavated it. In order to remove it, however, the archaeologists had to work with the seasons and also replace the cellulose, that had long since dissolved in the water, with a polymer.

While I very much enjoyed this article, there is one curiously written sentence in this article that seems to say that because a nail fell out of one of the timbers it was probably similar to the ones that were used in the crucifixion of Jesus. I was unaware that one of the properties of the Holy Nails was that they came out of the wood easily. Kunzig, the blurb at the bottom of that page says, is a senior editor. He could probably have used the services of an editor for that sentence.

National Geographic April 2014, Part 2

Cosmic Dawn, by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, photographs by Dave Yoder

This article is about the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Scientists often need more specific details than they can get with one telescope. This need led to the development of telescope arrays, which are several (or even numerous) telescopes spread out over a distance. Somehow, the distance between the telescopes can allow more specificity in the images. Some smaller arrays were set up in the middle of the 1900s, but scientists needed a larger array, on a scale of miles. The location needs to be high and have low water vapor and after quite a bit of searching, they decided on the Atacama Desert of Chile.

The telescopes at Atacama are spread out over miles, but are also portable. There are two vehicles that are used to move them around, so that the focus can be adjusted, depending on what they are looking at.

Through ALMA, for example, the scientists have been able to see the dust around a young star, and watch the dust start to clump together in what may well end up being planets.

Legacy in Lace, photographs by Charles Fréger, text by Amada Fiegl

Legacy in Lace is a pictorial of young women of Brittany wearing traditional lace headwear, known as coiffes. Brittany is a small area, but each region of Brittany has a traditional style of women’s headwear, which indicates, and probably leads to, a particular pride of her home. As Malwenn Mariel, a young woman who is reviving this tradition puts it in the article, “I am Breton, and I am French, but I am Bigouden first.”

National Geographic April 2014, Part 1

Can Coal Ever Be Clean? by Michelle Nijhuis, photographs by Robb Kendrick

Many places are dependent on coal for their power. Unfortunately, coal-fired power plants have a lot of drawbacks, chief among them the carbon dioxide that they produce. This carbon dioxide then goes into the atmosphere and helps with (I’m not sure if “helps” is the right word — “contributes to,” maybe?) global climate change.

This article primarily focuses on the experiments by coal-fired power plants in sequestering the carbon dioxide underground. In some places, they are pumping the carbon dioxide into caves, and in at least one, the Norwegian Sleipner oil field in the North Sea, they are pumping the carbon dioxide that is an impurity in the natural gas that they are harvesting into a brine-filled aquifer under the North Sea.

As an aside, I’ve been reading a lot about Norse mythology (including Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase and the Sword of Summer) and so when I saw the word “Sleipner,” I’m, like, “the horse?” Then I looked again and realized that it was “SleipnEr,:” not “SleipnIr.”

The scientists and engineers who are doing this acknowledge that it is risky. If these caves and aquifers spring leaks, a natural disaster could result. So, they are monitoring these sequestering locations 24/7. But, as with what people tell me when I tell them about my photo-scanning project, the technology may not always be there. What happens in a thousand years, if our civilization collapses and we lapse into something of a Dark Age and *then* these things spring a leak? I can just see our many-generations-distant descendants declaring these spots off-limits because no one can breathe the air there. It seems like we’re just kicking the can further down the road here.

It’s a pity that it would be prohibitively expensive, from an energy-use standpoint, to break the bonds between the carbon and oxygen. We’d end up with a big pile of carbon (which, maybe, could be reused as pencil leads or something?) and a lot more oxygen. And the increased oxygen would make the climate cooler, as well, I think. I ran that past Alex, and he agreed that it sounds to him that it would be the net effect, so there’s that. Of course, since oxygen does make things cooler, you would have to release the oxygen pretty far from the plant, because the oxygen would either make the plant explode, or would make the plant cooler, which would defeat the purpose of the fire in the plant.

Personally, I would like to see all parking lots, at least in the area from, oh, about the 30th or 35th parallels north to the 30th or 35th parallels south (so that they won’t spend the winter covered in snow) should be covered with solar panels. This would be a win-win-win situation. The landowner would get at least some free electricity from the panels, there would be less demand for coal-fired power, and, in the summer, the air conditioning in the cars would take effect faster, using less gasoline.

I’m also a big fan of planting trees. I take Matthew 6:2 very seriously, which leads me to be reluctant to make a big deal out of charity donations that I have made, but I guess it’s safe to say that I have two favorites. One is the Plant a Billion Trees project of the Nature Conservancy (they have other projects, but I usually donate to their attempt to reforest the Atlantic rainforest in Brazil). The other is American Forests. My favorite of their projects is their Urban Forests project, which is, well, planting trees in cities, and making things better both ecologically and psychologically.

A Tale of Two Atolls, by Kennedy Warne, photographs by Thomas P. Peschak

The two atolls of the title are Île Europa and Bassas da India, two teritories of France (despite the Portuguese name of Bassas da India) that are in between Madagascar and Mozambique. The two atolls are very different — Île Europa is an actual island with trees everything, and Bassas da India is just a ring of rock, but together, they support a wide variety of wildlife, including birds, sea turtles and Galapagos sharks.

National Geographic September 2015, Part 2

True Colors, by Patricia Edmonds, photographs by Christian Ziegler

True Colors is about chameleons. Edmonds goes into the conservation status of chameleons (threatened or near threatened) and a bit about habitats and such, but ultimately the meat of this article is about how chameleons change color and why they do so.

Chameleons largely change color as a means of communication. A red chameleon is feeling aggressive, but when it feels submissive, it will turn brown. In one species, at least, the females turn pink when they’re ready to mate, and then fade so that the pink is on a brown background once they are carrying fertilized eggs. As to the “how,” apparently, chameleons have a specialized skin layer that has crystals in it that cluster together or spread apart. As the crystals spread out, the color becomes warmer, going from green to yellow or orange or red.

Rescuing Mes Aynak, by Hannah Bloch, photographs by Simon Norfolk

Afghanistan needs money. To that end, they have leased an area outside Kabul, which is one of the world’s richest sources of copper, to a Chinese company so that the Chinese company can extract the copper. Mining was supposed to have begun in 2012, but the presence of the Taliban and difficulty in agreeing to the terms of the mining have led to a delay in beginning work.

This has given the archaeologists a chance to get in there to study the site and extract as many artifacts as they can. You see, for a period of five hundred years, beginning in the third century A.D., Mes Aynak was the home to a Buddhist community. Not many Buddhists were involved in heavy industry, but these Buddhists were, so the study being done at Mes Aynak will tell the archaeologists there, and from there, to the rest of the world, about the relationship between Buddhists and heavy industry.

Years ago, I did some volunteer work with some archaeologists and I discovered that much of the digging-and-sifting work done on dig sites is done by volunteers. I want to explore South Texas thoroughly over these next few years because once Alex is out of college (around eight years from now), I’m leaving Texas. And part of how I will “shop” for a new home is that I will be looking for active archaeological schools and other organizations that will take volunteers. Doing the digging-and-sifting work, so long as it’s not in the hot South Texas sun, sounds, to me, like a lot of fun. While working with the archaeologists, by the way, I got a chance to read some of the field reports put together by the Archaeologists at the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio. As I create my South Texas Destinations writeups I will occasionally refer to, and, when possible, link to some of these reports.

National Geographic September 2015, Part 1

Tracking Ivory by Bryan Christy photographs by Brent Stirton

Generally, for these posts I read the hard copy and then pull up the Internet version of the issue to refresh my memory while I write the article. In this case, I had to refer back to the issue, because the title at the top of the webpage was How Killing Elephants Finances Terror in Africa, and my first response was, “That’s not a National Geographic article. That’s a term paper.” And, yes, the title of the article in the actual hard copy is Tracking Ivory, which is the name given to the entire section of the website where the article can be found.

The National Geographic Society is starting a Special Investigation Unit and Tracking Ivory is the first article on the work of this unit. Christy was an attorney, but he is now a journalist. In Tracking Ivory, he hires a world-class taxidermist to make fake elephant tusks. These fake tusks look and feel exactly like the real thing and also have a hidden compartment where Christy hid a transmitter. Using this, Christy hoped to be able to track the path that the fake tusks will take.

Curbing poaching of elephants is important for two reasons. The most obvious, and most pressing, is that the population of elephants is dropping quickly — about 30,000 elephants are killed every year. The second reason is that the proceeds from the sales of these tusks is being used to finance terrorism. The Lord’s Resistance Army, the terrorist group headed up by Joseph Kony, is one of the primary traffickers in ivory.

Christy brings his fake tusks into Africa (and is detained by police along the way, which gives him hope that the traffickers will fall for his fake tusks) and gets the tusks to the traffickers. Along the way, we hear the stories of some of Kony’s victims.

At the article’s end, the tusks are in a house in Sudan, likely buried in the yard, because the tusks are in an environment that is cooler than the local air temperature. I have looked to see if Christy has posted any kind of update on their position, but have been unable to find anything.

Point of No Return, by Mark Jenkins, photographs by Cory Richards

Right up front, I’m going to tell you that the photograph on pages 88 and 89 is a spoiler for the ending. If you want to be kept in suspense, I recommend that you take a paperclip and ever-so-carefully paperclip the pages together so that it goes directly from page 87 to page 90.

Point of No Return follows Jenkins and Richards and the rest of their team of climbers as they attempt to be the first to take a GPS reading of the height of Hkakabo Razi in Myanmar, which may be the highest mountain in Southeast Asia. It was long thought to be the highest until another team of climbers reached the top of Gamlang Razi and used GPS to measure that mountain as 19,259 feet, which is higher than the most recent figures on Hkakabo Razi.

Jenkins is one of the last survivors of an adventuring group formed in 1993. The original group was four young men, two of whom are now dead. The fourth has stopped having these types of adventures, so Jenkins was climbing Hkakabo Razi, one of the most challenging mountains in the world, not just for him, but in memory of his late friends.

The climbing team consisted of five people, three men and two women, but ultimately only the three men attempted the final ascent. One of the women was insistent on going, but ultimately she makes what Jenkins describes as “the correct decision” and chooses to send one of the men instead. Unfortunately, we just have Jenkins’s word that it was the correct decision.

Ultimately, the climb is harrowing and I was very happy indeed to be sitting calmly at my sideline job on a balmy 70-degree day in South Texas, rather than attempting that climb myself.

National Geographic December 2013, Part 2

First Skiers, by Mark Jenkins, photographs by Jonas Bendiksen

The question of which people were was the first to ski is a complicated one. The invention of skiing is largely dated by petroglyphs, which are carvings in rock. There are ancient petroglyphs in both Norway and in China, possibly giving both the claim to having been the first to ski. To make matters more complicated, the oldest ski ever found is a fragment that has been dated using carbon dating, as 8,000 years old. It was found neither in Norway nor in China, but in Russia.

Jenkins takes the tack that the people in China, who are not ethnic Han, but Tuvan, who come from Siberia. Jenkins takes us to China to see these people, the Altay, at work. They do ski to this very day, using one ski, the bottom of which is covered in horse fur, and one pole. The horse fur is oriented so that the nap raises up when the skier is going uphill and prevents the skier from sliding downhill. When oriented in a downhill direction the nap lies flat and allows the skier to slide.

Jenkins also watches the Altay people show him the traditional Altay method of hunting elk. Elk-hunting is forbidden in China, so Jenkins’s hosts merely show him how to track and rope the elk and no elk are actually harmed in the process.

Virtually Immortal, by George Johnson

Virtually Immortal is about the projects of a group called CyArk from Oakland, California, to document as many historic structures as possible. They used computers to make virtual copies of many landmarks and World Heritage Sites, including (but not limited to) Chichen Itza, Carthage, Mount Rushmore, Pompeii, and Rapa Nui.

In Virtually Immortal, we go to India to watch the team digitize a step well called Rani ki Vav, or the Step Well of the Queen. In India, people dug wells to find water. As time passed, the wells became more elaborate, including staircases lined with sculptures that went down to the water. Rani ki Vav is extremely elaborate, with carvings of gods and nature spirits lining the walls. Rani ki Vav was filled in with silt and sand within about 200 years of its construction, and the people at CyArk aim to save a digital copy of it so that it will never be lost again.