Can caribou be saved?

Caribou make do. They use as little as possible, often what nobody else wants. They perfected this impulse over tens of thousands of years, chasing north after retreating ice sheets while most other hoofed animals stayed further south, or spreading themselves thinly across scraps of land in forests and valleys and on mountaintops.

Suffice it to say that Rangifer tarandus is built for survival. Females even limit themselves to the birth of a single calf each year, the better to husband resources. Yet today, after more than a million years on Earth, the caribou, also known as the reindeer, is under threat of global extinction. That’s despite huge efforts by conservationists and Indigenous Peoples, streams of scientific analysis, dozens of provincial and federal legal instruments designed to protect caribou, plus lots of money, brainpower and passion. It’s like watching a boulder roll down a hill.
Can this iconic species be saved? Read the full story.

Six years, 470 hours of film,
100 journals, 24,000 kilometres

Ten days into her planned two-year traverse of the Trans Canada Trail, Dianne Whelan ripped up her schedule. Six years later, she’s finally completed the trip, becoming the first person to complete the 24,000-kilometre Trail in its entirety.
“I really did think I could do it in two years,” she says. “I had a schedule, like most people do when they go off on these adventures, but on Day 10 in Newfoundland, I realized I had not gone as far in 10 days as I had planned to go in one day.”

At that point, Whelan faced a decision.

“I just thought, ‘Why are you out here? What is this all about? Does it really matter how many kilometres you do in a day?’” she says. “And I realized no, of course not. I’d come out here as an artist, to make a film and write a book.”
Read more about Whelan’s epic expedition on the Trans Canada Trail.

September 30: A day for reflection

September 30 will mark the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a statutory holiday for employees in the federal government and federally regulated workplaces.

The announcement came in the wake of the heart-wrenching discovery of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. in May. Since then, more than 1,300 unmarked graves have been identified at the sites of several former schools across Canada.

The offices of Canadian Geographic and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society will be closed on Sept. 30 as we take this opportunity to honour and remember the students of residential schools, their families and communities. We again express our gratitude to the Indigenous writers, photographers, artists and storytellers who have helped the magazine to tell the stories of residential schools and move forward the process of truth and reconciliation. Discover and explore some of their work at this link and be sure to follow Canadian Geographic on Twitter for more.

Check out what’s new in the shop!

Solving a geological mystery

Stretching some 1,000 kilometres from northern Vancouver Island to California’s Cape Mendocino, the Cascadia subduction zone marks the boundary where the Juan de Fuca, Explorer and Gorda plates are slowly sliding beneath the larger, continental North American Plate. Although continually on the drift, the plates can sometimes become stuck when they come in contact, causing an immense buildup of strain that eventually overwhelms the friction between them. When that energy is released, an earthquake occurs. A big one.
Scientists have figured out that the Cascadia subduction zone experiences these “megathrust” earthquakes anywhere from every 200 to 800 years. The last one occurred in 1700, which means the next one could occur in another 500 years or so ... or next week. For his new book On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, reporter Gregor Craigie spent a decade conducting in-depth interviews with geologists, engineers and planners about earthquakes: how we measure them, how we plan for them, and ultimately, how we survive them.
Read an exclusive excerpt from the book