Nature beauty and much more

Mount Everest, Himalayas, Nepal

In the massif of the Himalayas, which forms the boundary between Nepal and China, stands Mount Everest. Rising to an altitude of 29,028 feet (8,848 m), Everest is the highest point on the planet. In Nepali the mountain is called Sagarmatha, He whose head touches the sky,” and in Tibetan it is called Chomolongma, Mother Goddess of the world.” The name Everest comes from the British colonel George Everest, who in 1852 was assigned the task of drawing up a cartographic outline of India. Since the triumphant expedition by the New Zealander Edmund Hilary and the Nepalese Sherpa Norgay Tensing on May 29, 1953, Everest has inspired more than 300 successful ascents and has claimed some 100 lives. But crowding has caused pollution problems, and the consumption of brushwood for campfires has stripped the slopes and exposed them to erosion. However, in the past ten years, new regulations, clean-up operations, the installation of solar panels, and the introduction of portable fuel for expeditions have helped reverse the degradation of this fragile high-altitude site, declared a national park in 1976, which is vital to the Sherpas.

Whale off of the Valdés peninsula, Argentina

After summering in the Arctic, whales return to the southern seas each winter to reproduce. From July to November, whales mate and bear their young along the coasts of the Valdés Peninsula in Argentina. Until the 1950s, this migratory marine mammal was extensively hunted for its meat and the oil extracted from its fat, which brought it to the edge of extinction. Protective measures were adopted after international attention was focused on the problem in 1937. In 1982 a moratorium was declared on whale hunting for commercial purposes, and in 1994 the austral seas become a whale sanctuary; the Indian Ocean was established as a sanctuary fifteen years earlier. Despite these efforts it was estimated in 2001 that more than 21,000 whales have been killed since the enactment of the moratorium, mainly by Japan and Norway. After decades of protection, 7 of the 13 whale species, of which only a few thousand remain (10 to 60 times fewer than in the early twentieth century), are still endangered.

Birds flying over the lagoon near the mangroves of San Blas, Nayarit state, Mexico

Mexico contains a great diversity of climate and landscape, including deserts, mountains, hardwood forests, and, as here, lagoons alongside mangroves—a subtropical rainforest typical of alluvial coasts. Although Mexico boasts more than 900 species of cactus, 1,000 orchids, and the same number of mammals, it is the country’s variety of birds that is most striking: no fewer than 10,000 species, including the celebrated quetzal, also known as the bird of the Aztecs.” Mangrove swamps are a favorite haunt of migrating birds. Here they find plentiful food: insects, mollusks, shellfish, shrimp, and small fish, which come to breed at the feet of the mangroves, a tree peculiar to this mixed ecosystem that is part sea and part land. Mangroves are essential to marine life. They also protect the shoreline, holding in place the sediments deposited by rivers and curbing the ocean’s erosion by acting as a breakwater.