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)

Texan-born photographer Peter Augustus has challenged our notions of what exactly is in mystery meat with a series of photographs showing the ingredient in its original form.

Winner. “This was taken in the South Ari Atolls, Maldives, as the south-west monsoon season was setting in. It features my partner – and dive buddy – Emma after surfacing at the end of the last dive of the day to find 1.5 metre swells and dark monsoon clouds. MICK RYAN, JUDGE: This beautiful portrait of a diver in an ocean swell below a menacing sky stands out this month for its emotional and elemental beauty. It is a reminder that while we may play among nature we are always dwarfed by its power and must be constantly on our guard”. (Photo by Simon Dunn/The Guardian)

Men wearing masks and dressed as military members take part in a festival honouring San Silvestre, in the town of Catarina, Nicaragua January 1, 2016. The placard reads, “I'm not afraid, young people off the streets, Ortega you sell our country”, in reference Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega. (Photo by Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters)

A camel rests at a fuel station in the Judean desert near the West Bank city of Jericho January 11, 2015. Reuters photographers from Mali to Mexico have shot a series of pictures of fuel stations. Whether it is plastic bottles by the roadside in Malaysia or a futuristic forecourt in Los Angeles, fuel stations help define our world. Oil prices steadied above $48 a barrel on Tuesday, recovering from earlier losses as the dollar weakened against the euro. Oil prices have dropped nearly 60 percent since peaking in June 2014 on ample global supplies from the U.S. shale oil boom and a decision by OPEC to keep its production quotas unchanged. (Photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters)

In this April 13, 2018 photo, motorcycle taxi driver Ricardo Medina, 60, transports vegetable vender Rigoberto Herrera Mendez, left, and coconut vendor Osvaldo Ochoa in Campo Florido, east of Havana, Cuba. The three men expressed hope that new government leadership will improve things, saying the country cannot move backwards. “We survive life with our work”, said Medina. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

Jenny Odell repurposes online imagery mostly from Google Maps, but also from YouTube, Craigslist, and other sites. In her “Satellite Collections”, for example, she incorporated aerial views of swimming pools, basketball courts, parking lots, and other recognizable structures, seen from space. Her more recent series, “Satellite Landscapes”, includes painstakingly isolated Google Maps imagery of oil refineries, wastewater treatment plants, solar farms, etc. This work is meant as a reminder of our physically determined and vulnerable existence, since we depend on many of these things for survival and maintenance of our way of life. Photo: Natural gas plant in Pittsburg, CA (detail of Power Landscape), 2013. (Photo by Jenny Odell)