15-year old American girl Donica Streling meets with members of SHINee (샤이니) at SM Entertainment head office on June 20, 2012 in Seoul, South Korea. Donica, diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, visited Seoul, South Korea to meet her favorite K-pop groups SHINee and Super Junior after finding hope in listening to Korean pop. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun)

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)

Sergeant Andrew Garrett watches K-Dog, a bottlenose dolphin attached to Commander Task Unit 55.4.3, leap out of the water while training near the USS Gunston Hall March 18, 2003 in the Persian Gulf. (Photo by U.S. Navy/Getty Images)

Ants carry a leaf with a slogan reading “Merkel, Help!”, a reference of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at the zoo in Cologne, Germany August 18, 2015. Some of the zoo's 500,000 leaf-cutting ants carry laser-cut leaves with slogans during a campaign to protect the Amazon rain forest, organised by the German branch of World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) and Cologne Zoo. Picture taken through the glass of the display case. (Photo by Ina Fassbender/Reuters)

An Emperor Tamarin monkey, native to the Amazon rainforest, experiences its new home in the living rainforest enclosure at ZSL London Zoo on March 25, 2010 in London, England. Entitled “Rainforest Life” the large temperature and humidity controlled bio-dome is home to free-roaming monkeys, sloths, tree anteaters and tropical birds. The exhibit, which is opening in the International Year of Biodiversity, will be open to the public from March 27, 2010. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

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Based on the layout of Helm’s Deep featured in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, this 150,000 brick set piece is astounding. The artists, who go by the names Rich-K and Big J, apparently, nail the atmosphere and scale of the conflict of one Lord of the Rings most iconic scenes. At the time these photos were taken, the model was about 90% complete, with an estimated four months worth of work. The time, money and personal investment that must have gone into this project is impressive.

A boy carries a dog as he stands after a Peruvian police operation to destroy illegal gold mining camps in a zone known as Mega 14, in the southern Amazon region of Madre de Dios July 14, 2015. Peruvian police razed dozens of illegal gold mining camps at the edge of an Amazonian nature reserve this week, part of a renewed bid to halt the spread of wildcatting in a remote rainforest region. (Photo by Janine Costa/Reuters)

Individuals and populations student winner. Limbing in the Tropics, photographed in Manaus, Brazil. While walking in the Amazon rainforest looking for bat roosts to set up mist nets to capture bats for scientific research, a faint and almost imperceptible noise suddenly caught this photographer’s attention. An anteater was climbing with exceptional ability in a tangled mess of branches and lianas. (Photo by Adrià López Baucells/University of Lisbon/British Ecological Society)