A leggy evergreen looms over a stretch of Arctic boreal forest as light from the aurora borealis paints the night sky emerald green.
These natural fireworks shows, also called the northern lights, occur when solar wind—electrically charged particles blasted from the sun—collides with atoms in the upper atmosphere over the Earth's magnetic poles.
The Milford Mariner, a replica of a traditional New Zealand coastal trading scow, sails through a blue-gray fog in Milford Sound.
The sound, part of Fiordland National Park on the southwest coast of New Zealand's South Island, is surrounded by towering, jagged peaks strewn with waterfalls. The Mariner takes tours right up to (and sometimes underneath) the frigid cascades.
A close-up of meerkat in the Kalahari Desert shows its sturdy, rakelike claws, an important adaptation for their tunneling lifestyle. Meerkats are master excavators, frequently digging themselves entirely out of sight in pursuit of potential meals, which include beetles, scorpions, insect larvae, and small reptiles.
These handcrafted vessels, hewn from a single log and often in excess of 50 feet (15 meters) in length, likely carried the first Polynesians to the Hawaiian Islands more than 1,200 years ago.
A close-up of a mounted blue morpho butterfly shows its unique iridescent sheen. These mesmerizing insects, indigenous to the rain forests of Central and South America, get their cobalt hue not from pigment but from the thousands of semitransparent scales that filter blue from the visible spectrum and radiate it out from the wings.
