Deep beneath the green hills of Waikato lies a place that seems almost unreal. The Waitomo Glowworm Caves are famous for a dark underground chamber where thousands of tiny blue-green lights shine above visitors like stars in a night sky. The experience is especially memorable because visitors view the glowworms from a quiet boat moving along an underground stream.
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| A spectacular glowworm cave in New Zealand creates a starry-sky effect, with hundreds of tiny lights glowing against the darkness. |
The sight of goats standing on the almost vertical wall of a dam looks like something from a fantasy film. Yet the photographs are real. At Cingino Dam in Piedmont, northern Italy, Alpine ibex move across the steep masonry surface with remarkable confidence. Their unusual climbing ability has made the dam one of the most recognisable places associated with these mountain animals.
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| Alpine ibex climb the steep masonry wall of Cingino Dam in Piedmont, Italy, in search of mineral-rich deposits. |
Out in the Tasman Sea, far from Australia’s mainland, a dark column of rock rises sharply from the water. It looks almost too steep and isolated to be real. This is Ball’s Pyramid, a spectacular volcanic sea stack belonging to the Lord Howe Island Group. The first sight of Ball’s Pyramid is particularly difficult to forget. There is no broad shoreline or gentle slope around it. Instead, the rock rises abruptly from the ocean, making it look like a giant piece of the ancient landscape was left standing after everything around it disappeared.
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| Ball’s Pyramid rises sharply from the Tasman Sea as part of the Lord Howe Island Group World Heritage Area. |
Deep in the rainforest-covered mountains of Dominica, a lake churns beneath a veil of steam. Dominica’s Boiling Lake is not the kind of place you come across on an ordinary walk through the forest. Tucked away in the mountains of Morne Trois Pitons National Park, it sits at the end of a tough trail through the Valley of Desolation. The water is always moving, with bubbles breaking across the surface and steam rising into the air.
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| Boiling lake |
Abraham Lake looks like an ordinary mountain reservoir in the summer. In winter, however, the lake develops a strange feature that has made it famous far beyond Alberta: hundreds of pale bubbles appear trapped beneath the clear ice.
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| Methane bubbles trapped beneath the winter ice of Abraham Lake in Alberta, Canada. |
On Russia's Black Sea coast, near the resort city of Gelendzhik, a remarkable slab of sandstone rises almost vertically from the shoreline. Known as Parus Rock, or Sail Rock, it looks surprisingly like the sail of a ship standing against the sea. The unusual shape is not the result of human construction. It is a natural rock formation shaped by the long interaction of the coastline, erosion, and differences in the strength of the surrounding rocks.
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| Parus Rock, also known as Sail Rock, stands dramatically along the Black Sea coast near Praskoveyevka in Krasnodar Krai, Russia. |
On the coast of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, just north of Dahab, a nearly circular patch of deep blue water cuts into the Red Sea reef. This is the Blue Hole in Dahab, one of Egypt's best-known diving sites and one of the most recognisable underwater formations in the region.
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| The Blue Hole in Dahab is a famous Red Sea sinkhole surrounded by the rugged mountains of South Sinai, Egypt. |
For much of the year, the coast near Panjin in northeastern China looks like an ordinary wetland. Then the landscape begins to change. Salt-tolerant plants spread across the tidal flats, and as autumn approaches, their green vegetation turns shades of red. From a distance, the wetland can look like an immense crimson carpet stretching toward the water.
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| Panjin Red Beach in Liaoning, China, transforms into a vivid red in autumn thanks to salt-tolerant Suaeda vegetation. |
Balanced Rock is one of the most recognisable formations in the Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs. Its considerable mass of red rock appears to rest on a much narrower base, creating the impression that the formation could topple at any moment. It is a simple shape, but seeing it in person makes the illusion much more striking than a photograph suggests.
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| Balanced Rock stands among the dramatic red rock formations of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. |
High in the Andes of South America grows a plant that looks more like a green rock than an ordinary plant. Known as Yareta or Llareta, Azorella compacta forms dense, rounded cushions over the rocky ground of the high mountains. For generations, Yareta has attracted attention because of its extremely slow growth and remarkable longevity. Some descriptions have called it a 3,000-year-old plant, although scientific research gives us a more careful picture of just how old individual plants can become. Yareta survives in one of the harshest environments imaginable, where cold temperatures, intense sunlight, dry air, and limited water make life difficult for most plants.
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| Yareta forms dense green cushions across the rugged high Andes. |
From the ground, the Sahara can seem almost endless—sand, rock, dry valleys, and a horizon that goes on for miles. Yet in northern Mauritania, a geological formation's full beauty is difficult to appreciate from the surface. From above, the landscape suddenly forms a gigantic series of circular rings that resemble an enormous eye.
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| The Richat Structure, known as the Eye of the Sahara, forms a huge circular pattern in the Sahara Desert of Mauritania. |
Near the summit of Mount Kyaiktiyo in Myanmar’s Mon State, a large granite boulder covered with gold leaf appears to balance on the edge of a steep mountain. Above it stands the small Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, creating one of the most unusual religious landmarks in Southeast Asia. Better known as Golden Rock, the site attracts Buddhist pilgrims and travellers who are drawn to its remarkable appearance.
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| Kyaiktiyo Pagoda rises above the famous gold-covered Golden Rock on Mount Kyaiktiyo in Myanmar. |
The Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus) is a familiar sight in the far north, although its white coat can make it surprisingly difficult to notice. Much of the year is spent in a landscape of snow, rocks and low-growing plants, and the hare has several features that help it live there. Its thick fur protects it from the cold, while its strong legs help it move across snowy ground.
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| An Arctic hare, with its white winter coat, is in a snowy Arctic landscape. |
On the southern coast of Upolu, Samoa, a narrow ladder leads down into an enormous pool of clear blue-green water. This is the To Sua Ocean Trench, one of the most unusual natural attractions on the island. The name can sound mysterious, but its meaning is surprisingly simple. Samoa Tourism translates To Sua as a “giant swimming hole.” The pool is about 30 metres deep, and visitors reach the water by climbing down a long ladder to a platform inside the natural opening.
A landscape of bright white salt stretches almost to the horizon in southwestern Bolivia. In the dry season, its surface breaks into enormous geometric patterns. After rain, a thin layer of water can spread across the plain and turn the entire landscape into a near-perfect reflection of the sky. This is Salar de Uyuni, the Uyuni Salt Flat, one of the most extraordinary landscapes in South America.
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| The vast Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia features geometric salt patterns across one of the world’s largest salt flats. |
Most wells are places where people go to collect water. The Tuhala Witch’s Well in Estonia has a rather different reputation. Every so often, usually during spring flooding, water suddenly rises through the well and spills over its wooden cover. For a while, the quiet countryside around Tuhala appears to have a well that is "boiling".
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| Tuhala Witch’s Well overflows during a spring flood in Estonia, creating the unusual “boiling” effect associated with the site. |
Hidden in the hills of Nanjing, China, are three enormous pieces of limestone that were meant to become one of the largest stone monuments e...
