Merit Prize Winner: “A Well Earned Rest in the Sahara”. This photo of Moussa Macher, our Tuareg guide, was taken at the summit of Tin-Merzouga, the largest dune (or erg) in the Tadrat region of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria. Moussa rested while waiting for us to finish our 45-minute struggle to the top. It only took ten minutes of rolling, running, and jumping to get back down. The Tadrat is part of the Tassili N'Ajjer National Park World Heritage area, famous for its red sand and engravings and rock paintings of cattle, elephants, giraffes, and rhinos that lived there when the climate was milder. Photo location: Summit of Tin-Merzouga, Tadrat, Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, Algeria. (Photo and caption by Evan Cole/National Geographic Photo Contest)

A donkey savors warming temperatures after a long winter at the zoo in Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday, April 8, 2015. (Photo by Czarek Sokolowski/AP Photo)

An Indian women offers early-morning prayers or a “puja” at a ghat early in the morning on the banks of the Betawa River in Orchha in the state of Madhya Pradesh on July 5, 2015. (Photo by Rebecca Conway/AFP Photo)

In this November 19, 2015 photo, Ester Melendez feeds banana porridge to her nine-month-old daughter Dina, in Pichiquia, an Ashaninka indigenous community in Peru's Junin region. Incursions and assaults by loggers, miners, colonists and leftist guerrillas have reduced the lands of the Ashaninka people in the Peruvian Amazon, leaving many of the 97,000 members of the group malnourished, despite efforts by the government and independent organizations to help. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Dana Clark, and her son 18 month old Mason, wait in line at City Hall as early voting begins for the upcoming presidential election in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., October 16, 2020. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn/Reuters)

A supporter of the opposition parties shouts asking for peace as riot police are block access to the house of the former president Henri Konan Bedie, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Tuesday, November 3, 2020. (Photo by Leo Correa/AP Photo)

Police officers detain a Femen activist during a demonstration of supporters of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, during annual gathering held on the week of the 45th anniversary of the dictator's death, in Madrid, Spain, November 22, 2020. (Photo by Javier Barbancho/Reuters)

Ukrainian refugee circus student Mariia Lysytska stretching in a training room in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, February 13, 2023. More than 100 Ukrainian refugee circus students, between the ages of 5 and 20, found a home with the Capital Circus of Budapest after escaping the embattled cities of Kharkiv and Kyiv amid Russian bombings. (Photo by Denes Erdos/AP Photo)