“On the morning of August 9, 1945, I was perched atop a giant persimmon tree in our backyard, catching cicadas,” says Minoru Moriuchi, left. Then “the sun exploded.”
Kumiko Arakawa
, right, who died in 2019, lost both parents and four siblings in the bombing. “At age 20, I was suddenly required to support my surviving family members,” she says.
Just 14 when the bomb hit, Fujio Torikoshi, above left, was in front of his house and saw a black dot in the sky. It then burst into “a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings,” he said in testimony.
He wasn’t expected to survive from injuries past the age of 20, yet he lived until 2018. “Life is a curious treasure,” he wrote, above right.
“I am a third-generation hibakusha; however, I have not been very cognizant of this throughout my life. Still, there are visible scars all over Nagasaki from the time of the bombing … I hope that visitors to Nagasaki will pass on the stories of terror involving the atomic bomb,” wrote Hideki Kuroita, above right. His daughter, Kiharu, above left, signed her name at the bottom. Read more.
Winter is coming: A Nat Geo team set out on a mission to find evidence of Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men’s disappearances. The team soon became trapped in a maze of ice floes while searching for the infamous Northwest Passage. (Pictured above, photographer Renan Ozturk from atop the mast of Polar Sun.)
PHOTOGRAPH BY HOWELL WALKER, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Splish splash: Beating the summertime heats looks the same 70 years ago as it does today—with a dip in the pool on a hot summer day. The above photo from Nat Geo archives was published in the March 1951 issue, and shows New Yorkers spending a day at the Flushing Meadows pool in Queens.
Where the wild things are: Barred owls, river otters, pileated woodpeckers, and alligators are only a fraction of the wildlife you might encounter while paddling on the Cedar Creek in Congaree National Park (pictured above). Want to see even more? We narrowed down the top 10 parks in the U.S. to get your fill of animals.
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Hannah Farrow, and Jen Tse. Amanda Williams-Bryant, Alisher Egamov, Rita Spinks, and Jeremy Brandt-Vorel also contributed this week. Thanks for reading!
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