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The narwhal, a kind of Arctic whale, has been called “the unicorn of the sea” because of the long, straight, often spiraling tusk that males of the species can grow.  It is illegal to import the tusks into the United States because narwhals are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as near-threatened.

Now the Department of Justice says it has cracked a smuggling ring that operated for nearly a decade, often shipping narwhal tusks from the Canadian Arctic over the border into Maine in a trailer with a false bottom. Two Americans have been arrested, and an indictment, provided to ABC News by the Justice Department, says they will be charged next week with smuggling and money laundering.

“The conspiracy we’ve alleged was over a period of 10 years, so there appears to have been enough of a market to support that length of conduct,” said Todd Mikolop of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section in an interview with The Associated Press.

The indictment says Andrew Zarauskas of Union, N.J., and Jay Conrad of Lakeland, Tenn., will each face 29 federal charges for buying the tusks illegally, and two Canadian citizens — their names redacted — will face charges there for being sellers.

The indictment says that from December 2000 to February 2010, the defendants conspired to “fraudulently and knowingly import and bring merchandise, consisting of narwhal tusks, into the United States contrary to law, and to attempt to import and bring such merchandise into the United States contrary to law, and to receive, conceal, buy, sell, and in any manner facilitate the transportation, concealment, and sale of such merchandise after importation, knowing that the merchandise was imported and brought into the United States contrary to law.”

Messages left for Conrad and Zarauskas were not immediately returned. The indictment cites an email in 2000 from Canada offering to sell a “5 foot narwhal tusk speciman [sic] — is in excellent condition — came from the Baffin Island area at Pond Inlet.” Over the years, it says, there were dozens of FedEx shipments and more than a hundred payments.

What kind of money could be involved?  A legal seller in British Columbia, Furcanada, said tusks can be more than 8 feet long and sell for $1,000 to $7,000 each.

The first four Nature’s Edge Notebooks in this year-long series reported some new realistic hope in the global warming crisis, this “story too big to cover — almost”, and explored its basic and sometimes paradoxical nature as a news story.

At year’s end, we are reposting these four Notebooks here as no less pertinent – in fact even more newsworthy, given the growing climate crisis, than when we first launched this Nature’s Edge series that aims to explore and analyze the unprecedented and psychologically daunting story of manmade global warming.

(Tom And Steve/Getty Images)

1. HOW WE CHOOSE EXPERTS ON MATTERS THAT MATTER. Which experts are most credble on how sunset really happens (despite appearances), on who really wrote Shakespeare’s works, and on manmade global warming.

Read and view more here.

(Getty Images)

2. JOURNALISTIC FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN A 2-MINUTE VIDEO ABOUT A CUTE MOUNTAIN MAMMAL. A 2-minute video about a furry wild animal in the Rockies shows how global warming is producing news stories that become, paradoxically, ever-newer.

Read and view more here.

(ABC News)

3. SEE HOW OUR WORLD WOULD LOOK IF GREENHOUSE GASES WERE VISIBLE — AND THE “TWO INVISIBILITIES” OF GLOBAL WARMING.  We look through a special infra-red camera that can “see” greenhouse gases, which are by definition invisible. (They let visible sunlight through but trap the invisible hot infra-red light that radiates back from the sun-warmed earth.) The world looks very different.

Read and view more here.

(Siegfried Layda/Getty Images)

4. GOOD NEWS ON GLOBAL WARMING: HUMANS AREN’T COMPLETE IDIOTS. REALISTIC HOPE IN “THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS” AND THE SURPRISING “ULTIMATUM GAME.” Our hunt for realistic hope in the manmade global warming story turns up news about the humans causing it:  the “tragedy of the commons” doesn’t happen, says the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, when the people who share the commons can talk freely among themselves. There’s also realistic hope in the remarkable counter-intuitive findings of how we all play “The Ultimatum Game.”

Read and view more here.

(Kibum Park/Raad, LLC)

Imagine an inviting green park with tall, shady trees and wide swaths of grassy lawn where you can hear live music or see theater or simply sit quietly soaking up the noonday sun.

Now, imagine that all underground in an old disused parking garage … but still with trees and grass in the bright sunlight — a little less bright, of course, on cloudy days.

This paradoxical vision is already halfway to becoming a reality in downtown Manhattan, a dream made possible partly by fiber-optic technology that can capture sunlight on high rooftops and literally pipe it down to shine further from big underground “skylights.”

Dan Barasch and James Ramsey envisioned it all in 2008 when they teamed up with an idea to transform an abandoned trolley terminal, a 1.5-acre lot underneath the Williamsburg Bridge and next to the Delancey St. subway station.

They dubbed their underground park the “Lowline,” a nod to Manhattan’s popular Highline Park that transformed another swatch of urban blight — in that case an unused and overgrown elevated rail bed.

PHOTOS: Lowline Park Project

Since they teamed up, Ramsey, an architect and principal at RAAD Studio, and Barasch, formerly VP of strategic partnerships for PopTech, have raised more than $500,000 for the project, including a Kickstarter campaign that totaled $155,000.

This past September, Ramsey and Barasch also staged an exhibit at a warehouse on Essex Street, just above where the proposed park would exist, in an effort to show the public what the Lowline could look like.

But lighting the underground space is a challenge and that is where Ramsey’s background in engineering comes in; the former NASA employee turned architect had already been working on a way to collect and funnel light when he approached Barasch about the idea of an underground park.

Ramsey and Barasch explain their concept and in more detail here:

The technology consists of fiber optic cables attached to devices Ramsey refers to as remote skylights. Equipped with GPS, these solar collectors follow and capture the sun funneling it down through the cables. The glass surface of the skylights filters out infrared and UVA rays, but still harvests the light necessary for photosynthesis to take place.

For the exhibit, Ramsey and Barasch, alongside a team of volunteers put this technology to the test; together with their team they hand fit together 600 pieces of anodized-aluminum sheets to create a curved dome, a silver canopy that cast the light down on the warehouse space. On the warehouse roof, 20 feet above, six tracking systems collected the light and piped it down to the space below.

“We looked to the way that they build space telescopes to actually cobble together a mesh of flat pieces to create a very completed curved surface, and that curved surface is calibrated to actually deploy the light,” said Ramsey, who worked with infrared spectrometry while at NASA.

With the help of volunteers, including engineers and team members from RAAD Studio, the duo created a mock-up complete with moss-covered knolls and Japanese maples. For their installation, they partnered with Sun Central, a Canadian-based solar technology firm, and Arup, a design and engineering firm that is also working on the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan.

“All of a sudden you have this idea beginning to emerge where you can take this ancient disused space underneath the city and actually turn it into a public space, a garden really, for everyone to enjoy,” Ramsey said.

Both Barasch and Ramsey point out despite their success so far, they still have a long way to go before making the Lowline a reality; first, they need to convince city and MTA officials (and ultimately the state) to let them use the site, a process that Barasch says requires both political and public support.

Barasch, who resigned from his position at PopTech in March, is devoting his efforts full time to the project focusing on fundraising and engaging with members of the community.

“This is not a short-term project,” Barasch said. “It’s very big in terms of its integration with the overall ecosystem of the space, the neighborhood, the subway line, the community and the city and we want to do this right.”

If they gain control of the terminal, Ramsey and Barasch estimate the project would cost $50 million in capital costs for construction and may take five to eight years to complete. Nevertheless, both remain determined to see the Lowline complete.

“It taps into this thing that every human actually just needs, which is public space and some semblance of being outdoors as well as being inspired by making the city more beautiful, more livable,” Barasch said.

For now, the trolley terminal remains an empty, shadowy cavern with an undetermined future, but one in which Ramsey and Barasch hope they can play a part.

Firefighters in Breezy Point, N.Y., in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Severe drought, wildfires and Hurricane Sandy top the government’s list of the costliest weather-related disasters of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.

A phalanx of destructive tornadoes, hurricanes and other severe weather helped contribute to a total of 11 disasters costing one billion dollars or more in 2012, NOAA said.

Leading the list is 2012′s persistent drought, the worst since the 1930s. Scientists said today that drought is currently affecting 60 percent of the country.

“Its impacts are most costly across the central agriculture states resulting in widespread crop failures and impacts to water-intensive industries including shipping along the Mississippi River, which is still a challenge,” said Adam Smith, a climatologist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

There won’t be much relief for at least the next few months, NOAA said.

“We do expect the drought and dry conditions will continue into the spring,” said Dave Unger, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.  He said parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado will be hit the worst.

The summer heatwaves that went hand-in-hand with severe drought also caused 123 deaths, according to NOAA.

Wildfires burned more than 9.1 million acres this year, the second-highest total since 2000. Eight people were killed. Colorado suffered the most expensive wildfires, with several hundred homes destroyed.

Hurricane Sandy caused 131 deaths when it slammed the east coast in October, causing damage estimated in the range of $35 to $45 billion.  Sandy caused the New York Stock Exchange to shut down for two consecutive business days, something that hadn’t happened due to a storm since the great blizzard of 1888.

The full list of 2012 billion-dollar weather disasters can be found here.

NOAA scientists said that while each of the 11 severe weather events cost one billion dollars or more, final dollar amounts won’t be calculated until mid-2013.

Weather disasters cost the U.S. $60.6 billion in 2011, a number that 2012 is expected to surpass even though there were fewer-but more expensive- events.

2005-the year several hurricanes, including Katrina devastated the gulf coast- holds the record as the costliest year for weather disasters, at $187.2 billion, according to NOAA.

Climate scientists say they are studying how much of an impact global warming is having on extreme weather events.

“We do know the climate is changing,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. “But many of these events are local events and it’s hard to parse out specifically how much of a role climate change is having versus how much of that role is local and regional factors.”

A man passes a holiday display in Scranton, Pa., Dec. 4, 2012. (Butch Comegys/The Scranton Times-Tribune/AP Photo)

The nation’s climate in 2012 is on track to be the warmest and most extreme ever. And scientists tell us we should get used to it.

“It appears virtually certain that 2012 will surpass the current record (1998, 54.3 degrees F) as the warmest year for the nation,” NOAA said today in its monthly analysis of the nation’s climate.

“We have a clear signal for rising temperatures for the contiguous U.S. and the globe,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, N.C. “If this trend continues, we will be breaking records and be near record-breaking warm more often in the future.”

Scientists say the number of climate extremes, such as high daytime and nighttime temperatures as well as the amount of drought, heavy rain and even cyclones so far this year, is unprecedented.

“The percent of the U.S. experiencing extremes is twice what we’d expect. And that is a record,” Crouch told ABC News.

A stubborn drought is taking the biggest toll, with 2012 so far ranking as the 12th-driest ever recorded.

“We have been really warm but we’ve also been really dry,” said Crouch. “And that’s having real-world impacts on people.”

Climate scientists around the world warn the extreme trends will continue as long as humans continue to pump heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

The news comes as nations are feuding over how to best tackle the effects of rising global temperatures at the United Nations climate talks underway in Doha, Qatar.

New scientific studies show human-caused global warming is helping melt ice sheets around both poles. Melting land ice has helped raise sea levels by about half an inch since 1992, and scientists say that amount probably made flooding from October’s Superstorm Sandy even worse.

In a new NOAA sea level report released today, scientists said they have “very high confidence” that global sea levels will rise at least eight inches, and no more than 6.6 feet, by 2100.  The report presents four scenarios, including an “intermediate-high” scenario that predicts a 3.9-foot sea level rise by 2100 by taking into account ocean water that expands as it warms, as well as the loss of ice sheets.

“If the trend of warming temperatures continues into the future,” Crouch said, “we would expect more years to be like 2011 and 2012.”

By TJ WINICK and MARY COMPTON

In Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous places in the world, Boone Smith is on a mission.

Not for the military, but for wildlife organizations that want to track down the most elusive big cat on the planet: The snow leopard of Afghanistan.

“This was my Holy Grail for animals I wanted to catch,” he said.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and USAID challenged Smith, a fourth-generation big-cat trapper from Idaho, to capture and collar a snow leopard in Afghanistan in just 20 days.

“They’re borderline mythical, legendary,” Smith said. “If you can’t look at a snow leopard and appreciate it for what it is and the terrain it survives in, you’re missing something.”

It’s estimated that only 100 to 200 snow leopards are left in Afghanistan and that only 2,000 are left in the entire world. Poachers target these highly-endangered predators for their pelts and farmers will kill them for attacking their livestock. Wildlife experts want to find and collect more data on the big cat’s movements to keep them from going extinct and to help Afghan villagers protect their farm animals.

“If they can’t manage that land… and the wildlife and the resources that are found there, they can’t survive,” said Peter Zahler, the assistant director of WCS-Asia. “If they can’t survive, you can never have sustainability and stability in a country like Afghanistan.”

Credit: Nat Geo WILD

Smith traveled to the Wakhan Corridor, a mountainous border region in Northeastern Afghanistan — snow leopard country. His journey, in a film titled the “Snow Leopard of Afghanistan,” will be featured as part of Big Cat Week on Nat Geo WILD beginning on Sunday, Dec. 9.

Among those on his experienced team are a tracker named Hussain Ali and fellow trapper John Goodrich. The team set up humane traps with transmitters to alert them when an animal was caught.

“Trapping is a game of odds,” Smith said. “We’re trying to predict the exact spot a cat would put his foot.”

In the dead of night, after waiting only six hours, the team got a signal from the trap. They had caught a snow leopard.

Once the cat was hit with a tranquilizer dart, it was a race against time. The team only had one hour to complete a full exam of the animal and attach a satellite collar, which will collect valuable data and then  fall off after 13 months.

“We feel a responsibility for an animal we’ve collared,” Smith said. “We’ve taken some liberties with it, obviously, and we’re justifying that because of what we’re going to gain back in the big picture of conservation.”

Credit: Nat Geo WILD

Over the next few days, Smith and his crew saw the data sent from the collar, tracking the animal’s movements, which has helped notify villagers of when the big cats are approaching.

In a country where 80 percent of people live off the land, understanding the snow leopard means understanding a volatile ecosystem, one of the keys to rebuilding Afghanistan.

(SCAPE / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PLLC)

They are soft to the touch, but surrounded by a hard rough shell. Known as filter feeders, many as small as your thumb, they use their tiny cilia to draw in plankton, sediment and other particles over their gills and spit out cleaner water.

They dwell where salt water meets fresh water, and survive in a variety of temperatures from the chilly New England coast to the Gulf of Mexico. And they once played a vital role in New York’s harbor providing both a vitamin-rich source of food and a means of commerce and trade.

Now, the oyster could have a different role to play — helping clean New York’s polluted harbor.

These ecological engineers work round the clock filtering water, says Beth Ravit, an environmental scientist and professor at Rutgers University. One little oyster, or mussel, too, can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

“They literally change, physically and chemically, the system it’s a part of,” Ravit said.

Oysters help get turbidity, or cloudiness, out of the water, thereby allowing sea grass and other plant species to grow. In turn, Ravit said, this puts oxygen into the water, promotes photosynthesis, and creates conditions by which other marine species can survive.

Ravit, who works alongside the New York/New Jersey Baykeepers, an ecology advocate group, has been studying oysters, in the Hudson River Estuary since 2006 and says there are spots of populations along the coast, but otherwise they are close to extinct.  Once abundant, this bivalve population dwindled in the past century as a result of heavy industrial activity, such as shipping and dredging, as well as overfishing.

Oyster larvae seek substrate, or a surface area, to which to attach and search for adult oysters. As they begin to pile up, they form reefs that can serve to protect shorelines by providing wave attenuation and offer other marine plant and animal species places to live in the crevices within its rough hewed shell piles.

“They look like the cold water version of a coral reef,” Ravit said. “They create a home and a restaurant for other species to live and eat.”

In the absence of adult shells, or another suitable surface to which to attach, the larvae die off.

Over the course of her time with The NY/NJ Baykeepers, Ravit has tested 15 locations in the Hudson River Estuary in an effort to jump-start a viable breeding ground for larvae, but with varying levels of success.

“Oysters are sensitive,” she said. “They are more susceptible to sedimentation and contamination.”

Nevertheless, oyster and mussel restoration projects have gained momentum in the harbor. The New York/New Jersey Baykeepers has approximately 30 different partners and has launched six different pilot projects throughout the harbor since 2010, according the Baykeepers oyster restoration program director Meredith Comi.

In Manhattan, landscape architect and urban designer Kate Orff is also working on plans to re-introduce oysters to the harbor. Orff’s vision, which she calls Oyster-tecture, appeared 2010 in the Museum of Modern Art exhibit Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. It combines the oyster’s ecological benefits with elements of design.

“Oyster-tecture is about re-making and fabricating habitat infrastructure in cities that can serve jointly to increase biodiversity, but also enhance public space,” Orff said.

On a recent visit to the downtown urban design firm, Scape/Landscape Architecture P.L.L.C, at which Orff is a principle, she explained her concept as she pointed to colorful renderings on the studio’s walls. In one picture, beds of fuzzy rope knitted together create a support structure, one that could hold oysters beds above the siltation layer. The fuzzy rope beds interconnect reef structures made of rock and shell piles.

In another rendering, which Orff titled “The New Gowanus,” she points out a series of oyster nurseries called Flupsies, or floating upweller systems; they are eight-chambered boxes giving oysters a place to grow out of sight from predators. Strung together, the flupsies form a series of rafts and public walkways providing people with access to the waterfront.

For Orff and her team, Oyster-tecture remains a futuristic concept intended to be executed on a large scale, but for now they are testing the idea of it in the coming month at a small site. Her team of designers and volunteers plans to launch a pilot project in the Gowanus Canal, a federal superfund site in Brooklyn, by lowering cobweb-like panels of fuzzy rope into the polluted water within an active industrial zone.

“Our plan is to retro-fit a working pier, a pier that is receiving shipments and barged material, with these habitat structures so that we can measure and monitor the rate of mussel growth,” Orff said.

For this project, she is using ribbed mussels, a bivalve with similar filter feeding capabilities to oysters, but with a  higher tolerance for pollution.  She plans to monitor the mussels over the next five years, periodically measuring the biomass and taking water samples every few months.

There are some Brooklyn residents, like 75-year-old Ron Mehlman, who might find Orff’s work beneficial.

“I came here 18 years ago when it was almost impossible to walk across the bridge because the smell was so strong,” said Mehlman, whose sculpture studio was flooded by the Gowanus during Hurricane Sandy, forcing him to spend the past few weeks cleaning his workspace with bleach and water to mitigate mold and also the smell from the polluted canal.

“People should go back and look at Venice, for instance,” he said. “How they’re coping with it and how they work their problems out.”

Despite the interest in oyster restoration projects, they also have their setbacks. In 2010, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection shut down the New York/New Jersey Baykeepers efforts with two projects, one in the Navesink River and the other in the Raritan Bay, citing concerns about poaching and illegally harvesting oysters from polluted waters and fears that people would, in turn, eat the contaminated oysters.

In 2011, however, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, in partnership with the Navy, granted Ravit and her NY/NJ Baykeeper team members permission to renew oyster restoration efforts at a private pier located at the Naval Weapons Station Earle near Sandy Hook, N.J.

Oysters and mussels aren’t the only or final answer to cleaning New York’s pollution, and for now, Ravit is focusing on finding the right areas in the harbor for oysters to flourish.

“We have to get to a critical mass where they can create enough offspring to offset the natural mortality the species would have in the wild,” she said.

As for Orff, she said rebuilding oyster populations will not only help bring back cleaner water, but will encourage people to re-engage with the waterfront.

“The key lesson to Oyster-tecture is that we can start now with readily available materials,” she said. “It’s played a role in getting people excited again about the harbor as this new front door, or a new kind of Central Park.”

Credit: ABC News

There’s a reason it’s called “Iceland.” It’s covered in glaciers and for much of the year, it’s covered in snow.

With long nights, short days and few residents, it can be difficult to get around, and many people get lost. That’s where the Flugbjorgunarsveitin come in.

Known in English as the ICE-SARS — the Iceland Association for Search and Rescue — they are an all-volunteer force of 18,000 people who serve a country with a population of just over 300,000.

Iceland has no army, no national police.  Instead, these teams find the lost near the top of the world.

“Somebody’s got to do it,” said rescue volunteer Kristin Ingi Austmar. “When you manage to rescue somebody it’s usually a good feeling.”

In a place where winter can be long and lonely, the rescue squads have become part of the national fabric and it’s easy to see why. The teams are like the intense rescue part of Special Forces, combined with the community work of Boy Scouts and the camaraderie of the Lions Club.

Credit: ABC News

Svanur Larusson is a carpenter by day, but a rescue team leader 24 hours a day. He said in Iceland, unlike other countries, people have to rely on themselves. The members of ICE-SARS do not get paid for their work. They have to raise money to buy all of their equipment, from snow trucks to snowmobiles to climbing ropes.

The stunning Icelandic landscape attracts people from around the world, and the country thrives on the thousands of tourists that come each winter to see the glaciers. Every winter the ICE-SARS teams are mobilized to go out to search for a climber who has fallen into a crack in a glacier or simply disappeared. They often have to work through long dark days and bitter cold. Yet they do it willingly, eagerly and professionally.

Last winter, a climber from Sweden fell into a crevice but was able to get a cell signal long enough to call for help. Hundreds of volunteer rescuers mounted the glacier in the darkness to search. It took four days to find him, but by the time they did he was already dead.

“Nightline” tagged a long for a training mission with one of the legendary ICE-SARS teams — a group from the tiny town of Hella.

ABC's Jeffrey Kofman playing victim for an ICE-SARS training mission. Credit: ABC News

Watch what happens when ABC’s Jeffrey Kofman goes though a rescue exercise with the team inside of a glacier crevice in his “Nightline” report:

(Image credit: Luc Latulippe/Corbis)

Approach this story with caution.  A Texas veterinarian named Melba Ketchum claims in a press release that Sasquatch — the elusive, hairy being most often sighted in supermarket tabloids — is real, and she has the DNA samples to prove it.

In a research paper, “currently under peer review,” Ketchum says she and colleagues have sequenced the genomes from at least 20 “purported Sasquatch samples,” and concluded that “the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.”

Ketchum says the DNA sequencing suggests that Sasquatch is a human relative that arose about 15,000 years ago.

Taking her belief in Sasquatch’s existence to an even higher level, Ketchum suggests that law enforcement and public officials recognize the Sasquatch as an indigenous people and protect their Constitutional rights.

“Genetically, the Sasquatch are a human hybrid with unambiguously modern human maternal ancestry,” Ketchum said in the release. “Government at all levels must recognize them as an indigenous people and immediately protect their human and Constitutional rights against those who would see in their physical and cultural differences a ‘license’ to hunt, trap, or kill them.”

More details on the study will be presented “in the near future” when the study is published, according to the news release.  In the meantime, many Sasquatch-watchers say they are skeptical. “If the data are good and the science is sound, any reputable science journal would jump at the chance to be the first to publish this groundbreaking information,” wrote Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of  Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “Until then, Ketchum has refused to let anyone else see her evidence.” Radford suggested it may have been contaminated by human handlers, if it exists at all.

Ketchum did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

For more on the never-ending search for Sasquatch, click here.

Cheetahs on the Edge–Director’s Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

Mesmerizing, isn’t it? National Geographic, which shot this video for its November issue and offered to share it with ABC News, points out that cheetahs are the world’s fastest runners, though they have not been able to outrun the farmers and hunters who have moved in on their native habitats in Africa and Asia.  Fewer than 10,000 cheetahs are believed to survive in the wild.

The animals that appear in “Cheetahs on the Edge” live in the relative safety of the Cincinnati Zoo.  To make what cinematographer Greg Wilson calls the director’s cut, he and a Hollywood crew set up a camera on a 400-foot-long track — and tried to keep up with the cheetahs as they raced along at more than 60 miles per hour, chasing a piece of meat.  The camera shot 1,200 frames of video per second, fast enough that two seconds of a cheetah running all-out take two minutes to play.

The result you see, in glorious detail, in high definition.

“I’ve watched cheetahs run for 30 years,” said Cathryn Hilker of the Cincinnati Zoo.  “But I saw things in that super slow-motion video that I’ve never seen before.”

Cheetahs occupy an unusual place in the wilderness, and in the human imagination, writes Roff Smith in the magazine.  They are efficient predators (be glad you’re not a gazelle), but they are the only big cats that cannot roar.  They are often crowded out by lions, which are bigger and more numerous.  They are, as Smith writes, “the most vulnerable of the world’s big cats, surprisingly rare and growing steadily rarer.”

So if you have a few minutes to spare, they’re worth watching.  National Geographic has posted more at CauseAnUproar.org.