The Andes are the longest mountain chain in the world and the second highest mountain range in the world after the Himalayas. There are over a hundred peaks in the Andes with summits that exceed 6,000 meters (19,685 feet)-- and many of the mountains are covered in glaciers.

Glaciers cover 10% of the land area on Earth. They store about ⅔ of the world’s fresh water– an incredibly important and valuable resource. But as global temperatures rise, those glaciers are disappearing. Not only are we losing precious fresh water as glaciers melt into water that flows into the sea and gets salty and harder to use, but all that water is also causing sea levels to rise. If all of the glaciers on Earth melted, the sea level would rise about 230 feet, flooding every coastal city on the planet and displacing about one-third of the world’s population.

One person who is working to help understand and raise awareness of the problem of shrinking glaciers is Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña. She’s a glaciologist– a type of geologist that specializes in studying glaciers. She has a Bachelor's degree in Earth Science from Rice University, a Masters from Brown University, and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was also a Fulbright Fellow in Nepal where she lived for 10 months. Her current job is Communications Lead at North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center at the University of Colorado, one of nine Climate Adaptation Science Centers across the country.

Ulyana’s Persistent Pollutants Project: https://scienceinthewild.com/persistent-pollutants-project/

To follow Ulyana and Ricardo’s mountain climbing expeditions, visit http://summitssongsandscience.com/index.html

To learn more about glaciers, visit the world glacier monitoring service website wgms.ch/

Watch Ulyana’s TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE54K0sF-1g

This podcast is produced by 3Wire Creative.

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Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. In fact, chimps are more closely related to you and I than they are to other apes, like gorillas. That means we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying chimpanzees. But to really learn the secrets of these amazing animals, you can’t just watch them in a zoo. You have to venture out to where they live.

Jane Goodall’s work with wild chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s was groundbreaking in many ways. No one had ever gotten wild chimpanzees to trust them enough to allow close observation of what they do. And, although people had studied captive chimpanzees for decades, she saw chimps doing things that had never been seen before. Her work revealed that wild chimpanzees have much more complex and sophisticated behaviors than people previously thought. That was true of both their individual behaviors– like fishing for termites with a stick– but also their social interactions.

But Jane Goodall’s work also proved that it was possible for wild chimpanzees to become habituated to the presence of humans. And that paved the way for other researchers to do the same...

Researchers like Dr. Jill Pruetz, who has been studying wild chimpanzees in the West African nation of Senegal since 2001 when she began the processing of habituating chimpanzees at a savanna site called Fongoli. While several other groups of forest chimps had been habituated since Jane Goodall’s work in the 1960s, no one had successfully habituated savanna chimps. Until Jill Pruetz did-- and her work has revealed that savanna chimps are quite different from forest chimps.

Jill Pruetz is Regents Professor of Anthropology at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. In addition to publishing dozens of research papers about chimps and other primates, she is also the author of several books, including her latest, Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna published by The University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about Jill Pruetz’s work with savanna chimpanzees and how you can help:

Jill Pruetz's Faculty Profile at Texas State University: https://faculty.txst.edu/profile/2013121

Jill Pruetz book, Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo238989411.html

Neighbor Ape, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of chimpanzees in Senegal and to the well-being of humans that live alongside them: https://www.globalgiving.org/donate/10235/neighbor-ape/

This podcast is produced by 3Wire Creative.

Help support this podcast and future episodes by checking out Autio the perfect travel companion app for more engaging road trips. Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it.

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The Himalayas are the highest mountains in the world. They span some 1,500 miles through the heart of Asia, from Afghanistan to China. Having such enormous mountains makes much of the Himalayan region hard for people to access. But that doesn’t mean that nothing lives there. The Himalayas are home to some incredible types of wildlife that have adapted to the thin air, steep slopes, and very cold temperatures. But living in the upper slopes of the Himalayas makes these among the most difficult wild animals to catch a glimpse of– and even harder to photograph.

Prasenjeet Yadav is a nature and wildlife photographer from India who specializes in capturing images of elusive creatures. Prasenjeet has a background in science, having trained in a field of biology known as molecular ecology before turning to a career as a full-time photographer. His work has taken him all over his home country of India and surrounding areas. His photographs of snow leopards from the Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh appeared in the July 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.

To see some of Prasenjeet Yadav’s photos of snow leopards and other wildlife, visit his website: https://www.prasenjeetyadav.com/. You can also follow him on Instagram: @prasen.yadav.

To learn more about snow leopards and ways to help protect them, visit:

Snow Leopard Trust https://snowleopard.org/

Nature Conservation Foundation https://www.ncf-india.org/

This podcast is produced by 3Wire Creative.

Help support this podcast and future episodes by checking out Autio the perfect travel companion app for more engaging road trips. Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it.