At 10,582 square kilometres, the Bolivian salt flats – otherwise known as Salar de Uyuni – are the largest on the planet and contain between 50 and 70% of the world’s lithium reserves. After exploring Chile and Argentina, photographer Joel Santos decided to travel to Bolivia in January 2017 to check the salt flats off his bucket list. With an electrical storm rolling in, Joel and his two travelling companions were the only souls left on the vast flats and captured the eerie flats without a person in sight. (Photo by Joel Santos/Barcroft Images)

Fisherman Jose Miguel Perez, whose nickname is “Taliban”, navigates the oil infested waters of Lake Maracaibo, near Cabimas, Venezuela, May 21, 2019. Nobody lives as closely with the environmental fallout of Venezuela's collapsing oil industry as the fishermen who scratch out an existence on the blackened, sticky shores of Lake Maracaibo. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

The battleship USS Iowa fires its 16-inch guns during duty in the Persian Gulf on December 16, 1987. In 1943, the Iowa ferried President Franklin Roosevelt home from the Teheran Conference, where post-WW II leaders divided up the world. The ship fought battles from the South Pacific to Korea and escorted convoys through the Persian Gulf. Forty-seven sailors died atop its deck when an explosion ripped through a gun turret. Now, the new port for the retired USS Iowa just might be the home of California's annual asparagus festival, the gritty agriculture port town of Stockton on the San Joaquin River, about 80 miles inland from San Francisco. (Photo by Eric Risberg/AP Photo)

In this October 6, 1976, file photo, a right-wing student, center foreground, draws his arm back to strike a captured and wounded leftist student being taken by police to an ambulance in during a student massacre in Bangkok, Thailand. This year’s anti-government protests are seeking new elections, a more democratic constitution and an end to intimidation of political activists. Their speeches have repeatedly highlighted the 1976 tragedy, piquing the interest of the current generation in what their forebears faced. (Photo by Neal Ulevich/AP Photo/File)

People and security members run away as Kurdish animal rights activists release a bear into the wild after rescuing bears from captivity in people homes, in Dohuk, Iraq on February 11, 2021. (Photo by Ari Jalal/Reuters)

Police memebers stand guard as a group of women protest in front of the police headquarters after knowing that the body of María Belen Bernal was found murdered in a police officers' school and which main suspect – Bernal's husband police lieutenant German Caceres – is at large, in northern Quito, on October 1st, 2022. According to the prosecutor's office, at least 573 femicides have been registered in Ecuador's population of 17.7 million since 2014. In the first months of 2022 there had been 206 murders of women, according to Geraldine Guerra from the Aldea NGO that tracks femicides in the country. (Photo by Rodrigo Buendia/AFP Photo)

Female soldiers of Tigray Defence Force (TDF) celebrate while they sit on men's shoulders as people celebrate their return on a street in Mekele, the capital of Tigray region, Ethiopia, on June 29, 2021. Rebel fighters in Ethiopia's war-hit Tigray seized control of more territory on June 29, 2021, one day after retaking the local capital and vowing to drive all “enemies” out of the region. (Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP Photo)

A fisherman throws his net beside a half-submerged M/V Palawan Pearl after it collided with a Cyprus-flagged BKM 104 dredger in Manila bay, Philippines on Thursday, July 8, 2021. A Philippine cargo vessel and a Cyprus-flagged dredger collided in a Manila Bay anchorage area early Thursday, resulting in no injuries but causing the cargo vessel to list and lie half-submerged in the busy waters. (Photo by Aaron Favila/AP Photo)