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)

Girls of the Long Horn Miao ethnic minority group wear headdresses as they prepare gather for Tiaohua or Flower Festival as part of the Lunar New Year on February 6, 2017 in Longga village, Guizhou province, southern China. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Smoke billows from Mt. Etna volcano, as seen from an area near the village of Sant'Alfio, north of Catania, Sicily, southern Italy, Sunday, November 12, 2023. (Photo by Salvatore Allegra/AP Photo)

An aurora is seen in the sky in Pajala, Sweden on February 10, 2022. (Photo by Alexander Kuznetsov/Reuters)

A majestic elephant visits the watering hole at the Zimanga Private Game Reserve in South Africa under the Milky Way in August 2022. (Photo by Sean Weekly/Animal News Agency)

A protester performs the symbolic death of a student demonstrator during a march near Congress where Chile's President Michelle Bachelet gives her annual address in Valparaiso, Chile, Thursday, May 21, 2015. Demonstrators are protesting the death of two students killed during an education reform march last week in Valparaiso and demanding more involvement in education reform. (Photo by Luis Hidalgo/AP Photo)

Young devotees carry oil lamps in the early morning of the tenth day celebrations of Hindu Nepali festival “Dashain” at a temple in Bhaktapur on the outskirts of Kathmandu on October 24, 2023. (Photo by Prakash Mathema/AFP Photo)

A woman runs through a sea foam, as a seasonal cold front moved over the Cape Peninsula, following a week of severe weather and flooding in Cape Town, South Africa on June 19, 2023. (Photo by Nic Bothma/Reuters)