National Geographic BlogWild

Friends and colleagues Sarah Caban (editor of the My Wonderful World blog) and Maggie Strassman (intern and University of Wisconsin Madison geography department superstar) have lined up a bevy of fired-up contributors for the first annual Geography Awareness Week Blog-a-Thon. The week, which runs through Saturday, coincides with the National Geographic Channel’s Expedition Week, and highlights the importance of geographic literacy and geography education in the United States.

Colleague Anne Haywood (in Austin, Texas) and I (at NatGeo headquarters in Washington, D.C.) got together virtually last week to discuss the ways National Geographic is using new media to inspire people to care about the planet—and to help them understand it. We gave our presentation—or, at least, our avatars did—at the New Media Consortium’s Symposium for the Future in Second Life, an immersive, 3-D virtual world.

National Geographic Emerging Explorer T.H. Culhane and his wife Sybille are passionate about energy and garbage. In fact, they are so committed to investigating new ways of approaching energy problems that they moved into a slum in Cairo, and are teaching the people there how to make solar water heaters from recycled materials and biogas from trash.

From afar, the primeval mountainsides of the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica appear both majestic and mysterious. Venture within with National Geographic Young Explorers Greg Goldsmith and Drew Fulton and you will discover that this mist-enshrouded tropical evergreen forest is teeming with life. This astounding biodiversity owes much of its existence to the extra water bestowed by clouds, which condenses onto leaves and drips to the forest floor. This extra moisture supports the world's most diverse collection of orchid species and a thriving array of amphibians, reptiles, and birds.

Michael Wesch, a 2009 National Geographic Emerging Explorer and assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, has produced astonishing video shorts on communication, education, and culture in our increasingly wireless world. His radically innovative teaching strategies led CASE and the Carnegie Foundation to name him 2008's Outstanding Doctoral and Research Universities Professor of the Year. One of his videos--The Machine is Us/ing Us--has been viewed more than ten million times in its several versions, and eclipsed even the most popular Super Bowl commercials to remain the most watched video on YouTube before, during, and for weeks after the 2007 Super Bowl.

Wired magazine simply dubbed him "The Explainer."

When it comes to knowing about the world, Canada reigns supreme.

Team Canada claimed gold today at the National Geographic World Championship, held at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Student teams from Canada, Poland, and the United States have progressed to Wednesday's final round in the 2009 National Geographic World Championship.

We get our first real taste of ice on Iceland's southern coast at Solheimajökull. (The last part of the name is pronounced yokel, as in "local yokel," and means "glacier" in Icelandic.)

Late-night twilight greetings from Iceland! I'm here with Nat Geo Student Expeditions and a group of (I asked what adjective to use to describe them, and they chose) extraordinary teens. We've come to photograph this island, to study the wild geology that put it here just south of the Arctic Circle. We're documenting the effects of climate change—the melting away of glaciers that have covered Iceland for millennia and that gave it its very name.

Thomas Culhane, Katey Walter, and Jon Waterman share their insights on co-existing with the planet at the 2009 National Geographic Explorers Symposium.

More highlights from the 2009 Explorers Symposium, including photojournalist Kirsten Elstner, National Geographic Young Explorer Ben Horton, and Nat Geo Fellow Reza.

Exciting times at headquarters, as state champions from across the nation have descended on Washington for the National Geographic Bee finals. All of these kids are winners who know an astonishing amount about our world. To make it this far, students in grades four through eight had to answer increasingly tough questions and outlast a field of more than five million competitors to advance through school and state rounds.

Further competition this week winnowed the field to ten finalists, who vie today for the National Geographic Bee championship.

In what's become an annual reminder of just how much these kids know, and how much I have to learn, I sat in for one of the finalists—Michigan's Kenji Golimlim—during the dress rehearsal yesterday with host Alex Trebek in our Grosvenor Auditorium.