Lençois Maranhenses National Park, a coastal dune field in Brazil, that is flooded with fresh-water lakes during the rainy season.
Wine grapes thrive in the pits of volcanic ash on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
The Vertical Forest, a pair of eco-futurist residential towers in Milan, Italy, has over 900 trees on the balconies to help mitigate CO2 and filter air pollution.
The Big Lagoon area of Shark Bay, Australia, is home to some of the world’s biggest and most diverse sea grass beds, which are habitat and food for a host of marine species.
Particularly strange dot-shaped dunes on the plain of Wādī Ḩazar in Yemen’s portion of the Rubʿ al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, on the Arabian Peninsula.
Staggered rows of houses fill a new suburban development in Yunnan Province, China, and face lines of tube-shaped plastic greenhouses.
The Atacama Giant sprawls across a hillside in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Measuring a staggering 390 feet long, it is the largest anthropomorphic geoglyph in the world.
Jason Gulley, Celia Trunz, and Glenn Mattioli installing a GPS station on the Greenland Ice Sheet to measure the rates of ice loss due to movement and melting.
A grid of floating sea cucumber pens shares Yantai Harbor, China, with the industrial shipyard of CIMC Raffles, where deep-water oil rigs are constructed.
A seaplane flies over one section of Australia’s fourteen-thousand-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, one of the planet's most dynamic yet imperiled storehouses of biological diversity.
Around the world, millions of poor residents of coastal cities live in slums built on stilts, as here along the Parola Binondo side of Manila’s harbor, Philippines.
Zebras thrive among the “fairy circles” of grass on the edge of the Namib Desert.
Mimicking the contours of natural formations, the concentric steps of China's Loess Plateau have been shaped by farmers to better accommodate terraces of wheat.
Standing 992 feet high, Riyadh’s Kingdom Centre was the tallest skyscraper in Saudi Arabia when completed in 2002.
Farmers employ center-pivot irrigation to cultivate crop circles measuring one kilometer in diameter at the edge of Saudi Arabia’s portion of the Empty Quarter.
The amber and fuschia lights of the Koppert Cress greenhouses in the Netherlands have been designed to maximize growth efficiency and minimize light pollution.
Detroit’s Brush Park neighborhood was known as Little Paris in its late 19th-century heyday, but in 2013, only a handful of the elegant Victorian mansions were still standing.
Anshan Iron and Steel works, a steaming, smoking, fiery array of structures covering a nine-square-mile site, is said to be the largest such complex in China.
On the high dry plains of Qinghai Province in northwestern China, one of the country’s fastest growing solar-power facilities spreads amid desert sands.
Wind turbines generate electricity along a dike that long ago turned one five-hundred-square-mile stretch of tidal flats into farmland in the Dutch province of Flevoland.
An egg farm in the region of Brazil known as the Cerrado, surrounded by trees planted to protect the monogenetic hens from wind-borne disease.
Wijdmeren, a former peat bog, was harvested to the point that it became a lake separated by small islets, that have been turned into pricey vacation properties in Noord Holland.
