Divers perform during an event to celebrate the upcoming Christmas at the aquarium in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, December 1, 2023. Christmas is one of the biggest holidays celebrated in South Korea. (Photo by Lee Jin-man/AP Photo)

Workers clean the premises of Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, Nepal, December 16, 2020. The Pashupatinath Temple in Nepal reopened for devotees on Wednesday morning, almost eight months after it was shut due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Xinhua News Agency/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

A Tamil devotee lights an oil lamp at a religious ceremony during the Diwali or Deepavali festival at Ponnambalavaneshwaram Hindu temple in Colombo, Sri Lanka on October 24, 2022. (Photo by Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters)

The Tree Projects team spent 67 days documenting one eucalyptus regnans in the Styx valley of Tasmania. Using a combination of tree-climbing and elaborate arboreal rigging techniques, they produced an intimate portrait from an impossible perspective of one of the world’s largest individual flowering trees, which goes by several common names. These photos document the process that resulted in an extraordinary ultra high-definition photograph. Here: Haley nears the top of the tree. (Photo by Steven Pearce/The Tree Projects/The Guardian)

Lightning strikes as smoke billows following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. The death toll from the unprecedented assault by Palestinian militant group Hamas on its territory rose to 900 in Israel, which has retaliated with a withering barrage of strikes on Gaza, raising the death toll there to 687. (Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP Photo)

A man carrying buckets walks along a beach littered with piles of debris and plastic waste at the Kedonganan beach in Bali, Indonesia, 19 March 2024. Most of the trash ends up in the sea every rainy season due to the island's lack of a centralized waste management system. (Photo by Made Nagi/EPA/EFE)

“A fter the former Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in August 1949, the US reevaluated its postwar defense policies. With the US monopoly on atomic weapons broken, military and political leaders chose to diversify the American stockpile by developing thermonuclear and tactical nuclear weapons. One of the more interesting concepts to come out of this period was atomic artillery, which was successfully tested at the Nevada Proving Grounds (now the Nevada Test Site) in May 1953”. – Alan Carr. Photo: Atomic Annie at work during the Upshot-Knothole test series, 1953. (Photo by Los Alamos National Laboratory/US Army)

A dolphin swims alongside ships and fishing boats at the Bosphorus in Arnavutkoy district of Istanbul, Turkiye on May 21, 2023. (Photo by Isa Terli/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)