The sun shines on Weston-super-Mare's Sand Sculpture Festival and the sand art currently being displayed on July 4, 2011 in Weston-Super-Mare, England. Now in its fourth year and with a Amazon Jungle theme for 2011, the seaside resort's event attracts top sand sculptors from across the world and runs throughout the summer months. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

People leave a camp after a Peruvian police operation to destroy illegal gold mining camps in La Pampa, in the southern Amazon region of Madre de Dios, Peru August 11, 2015. Picture taken August 11, 2015. (Photo by Sebastian Castaneda/Reuters)

A member of the Pena de Pavao de Krishna traditional carnival group, which celebrates Indian deities, performs in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on February 23, 2020. The group added more accelerated northern rhythms to its repertoire in a way to raise awareness of the importance of the Amazon rainforest and the worrying rates that it is burning at. (Photo by Douglas Magno/AFP Photo)

Tom Kaulitz and Heidi Klum attend Heidi Klum's 20th Annual Halloween Party presented by Amazon Prime Video and SVEDKA Vodka at Cathédrale New York on October 31, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for SVEDKA)

Indigenous people march during the annual Free Earth camp, where they discuss rights, territorial protection and their role in COP30, which will take place for the first time in the Amazon, in Brasilia, Brazil, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (Photo by Eraldo Peres/AP Photo)

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)

Xiren Wang, Lili Wat, and Sitong Chen join the pageant’s opening routine, dancing to “The Boys”, a song by K-Pop group «Girls’ Generation». While the women come from a range of professional backgrounds – including economics, nursing, and acting – every contestant is looking for her big break into the entertainment industry. Most contestants said they would prefer to have a career in the U.S. but would go wherever the opportunity lies. (Photo and caption by John Brecher/Sahra Vang Nguyen/NBC News)

A new species of monkey found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and identified as Lesula (Cercopithecus lomamiensis) is seen in this undated photograph from an article published September 12, 2012 in the science journal PLOS One. The monkey was first seen in 2007 by researchers John and Terese Hart of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale Research Project. The finding of C. lomamiensis represents only the second new species of African monkey to be discovered in the past 28 years, according to the research article. (Photo by Hart J. A., Detwiler K. M., Gilbert C. C./Reuters)