Museum employee Victoria views a giant grouper fish specimen at the Natural History Museum in west London March 25, 2015. It forms part of a new exhibition, “Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea”, featuring a panoramic virtual dive and over 250 specimens from the Museum's coral, fish and marine invertebrate collection, which opens on March 27. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

A fado singer smokes a cigarrette outside a fado house at the Alfama neighborhood in Lisbon on May 8, 2019. From fado sounds to Cape Verde mornas or bossa nova: the Lisbon nights, where musicians from all over the world meet, have largely inspired Madonna's new album, who has been in the Portuguese capital since 2017. (Photo by Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP Photo)

Commuters by with the buildings of the banking district in background in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, February 6, 2020. (Photo by Michael Probst/AP Photo)

Travel photographer Amos Chapple recently crossed into Turkmenistan on a three-day transit visa and was able to photograph many of the sights and monuments in Ashgabat, the capital and largest city. Turkmenistan is a single-party country, a former Soviet state, run by a president at the center of a cult of personality.

Photo: A young couple leave the Alem Entertainment Center in Ashgabat. The current president has a history of breaking obscure records. In 2012 the wheel atop this complex was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest enclosed Ferris wheel. The structure was built at a cost of $90m. (Photo by Amos Chapple via The Atlantic)

“Dubai is sometimes called the “City of Gold” because of its stunning growth from a sleepy Gulf port to a world-famous business crossroads in the space of a single generation. Its nickname has a literal meaning for traders in the precious metal. The city is building itself up as a center for the gold trade, between sources in Africa and consumers in the rising economies of China and India”. – Kamran Jebreili via Associated Press

Photo: A gold press operator collects 10 gram gold blanks to press them with the logo of the Emirates Gold company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Gold prices remained relatively steady in 2012, close to $1,700 an ounce. (Photo by Kamran Jebreili/AP Photo)

A Palestinian boy holds an umbrella as he runs near houses that witnesses said were destroyed or damaged by Israeli shelling during the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, on a rainy day in the east of Gaza City November 16, 2014. (Photo by Suhaib Salem/Reuters)

The Royal Castle is seen a veil of heavy winter smog in Budapest, Hungary on January 30, 2017. (Photo by Laszlo Balogh/Reuters)