Pamukkale, Turkey, is home to these terrace pools, formed by the build-up of carbonate mineral from the warm water flowing from the thermal springs above. (Photo by Image Courtesy of Jennifer Hayes/Getty Images)

Damselflies covered in dew rest on a wild flower by the Po River, northern Italy on August 15, 2016. (Photo by Alberto Ghizzi Panizza/Barcroft Images)

“Strike Through The Mothership”. Every May for the last 3 years I have driven down to Tornado Alley to capture some amazing storms. This supercell held so much promise to drop a tornado but one small shift in the atmosphere and all that it produced was an extreme lightning show. Photo location: Broken Bow, Nebraska. (Photo and caption by Vanessa Neufeld/National Geographic Photo Contest)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)

The “Escape Velocity” moving sculpture by artist group Poetic Kinetics looms over Coachella festivalgoers on the Empire Polo Field, on the first day of the 2014 Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, on April 11, 2014. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision)

Monumental landscape artwork “Hush” by installation artist Steve Messam hangs in the moors of Teesdale on July 18, 2019 in Barnard Castle, England. The outdoor installation is inspired by the geology, mining history and landscape of the area. It hangs over Bales Hush, a deep gauge in the terrain created when miners flushed the area with water to reveal the geological riches below. Hundreds of metres of recyclable saffron yellow fabric blow in the wind. (Photo by Christopher Thomond/The Guardian)

The graffiti against the war in Ukraine of the street artist ChemiS in Prague, Czech Republic, March 19, 2022. (Photo by Amos Chapple/Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

The northern lights as seen from from Yell in the Shetland Islands, Scotland on January 15, 2023. The aurora borealis is caused by collisions between electrically charged particles released from the sun that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and collide with gases such as oxygen and nitrogen. (Photo by Ryan Nisbet/Capture Media Agency)