Deepwater Whip Coral, Japan

Deepwater Whip Coral, Japan
Photograph by Brian Skerry..

What looks like a tangle of gnarled cables is in fact a forest of deepwater whip coral in Suruga Bay. Each strand is studded with feeding polyps that reach tiny tentacles into the currents to grab floating food.

Redwood Tree, California

Redwood Tree, California
Photograph by Michael Nichols..

Partway up a 350-foot tree, botanist Marie Antoine (at right) passes a slender core sample of its wood—750 years of redwood biography—to canopy ecologist Giacomo Renzullo. Research now shows that the older such trees get, the more wood they put on.

Petrified Sand Dunes, Arizona

Petrified Sand Dunes, Arizona
Photograph by Richard Barnes.

Sinuous lines of color swirl through the Wave, the most famous landform at Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. Flash floods carved this passage through petrified sand dunes, exposing the iron-rich bands

Reindeer Herder

Reindeer Herder, Siberia
Photograph by Dmitriy Nikonov

Reindeer breeding is one of the basic forms of employment for the indigenous population of this region. Russia, polar region of West Siberia, Tazovsky peninsula.

The Adélie penguin

The Adélie penguin colony near Esperanza Base in Antarctica, the penguins color the snow with their feet as they shuttle between the sea and the colony.