Finland—On a window in Kotka, a slightly battered mosquito sits silhouetted against a mosaic of water drops, each reflecting spring sky and the crayon colors of nearby buildings.
Patio chairs and a satellite dish (lower left) mark one home as claimed in a new suburban development in Shenyang. The Chinese government estimates that the country is adding five to six billion square feet of floor space to its residential and commercial building stock every year.
Fragile nature meets technological ambition in the labor—roughened hands of a track worker. Li Yingde captured this snow finch while working on a new high-altitude section of China's 2,525-mile Beijing-to-Lhasa railway.
Dr. Zhibao Dong, research scientist of the Chinese Academy of Science, drives with other researchers past sand dunes in the Kumtag Desert located in the Xinjiang region.
Pu Dengyi offers a modest assortment of birds, squirrels, and other rodents caught near his mountain-village home at the weekly Lishadi market in the Nu River Valley.
From a construction crane 94 stories up, Shanghai's streets and skyscrapers seem incandescent with capitalism. One of every 20 dollars of China's GDP is generated in this city, and a fifth of the nation's exports—up 500 percent in real value since 1992—pass through its portals.
The 22-ton stainless steel propellers on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent pause in their work pushing the Canadian vessel through frozen waters—allowing a diver to venture near.
Playful as children, elegant as swordsmen, narwhals surface through a hole in melting ice as others do the same in the distance. This kind of movement, where several males converge and gently push against each other, is common in spring when narwhals migrate to coastal summering grounds. A large white patch, visible on the whale at right, is a scar left by a hunter's bullet.
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Patio chairs and a satellite dish (lower left) mark one home as claimed in a new suburban development in Shenyang. The Chinese government estimates that the country is adding five to six billi ...
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Fragile nature meets technological ambition in the labor—roughened hands of a track worker. Li Yingde captured this snow finch while working on a new high-altitude section of China's 2,525-mi ...
Avian king of the rain forest canopy, the Philippine eagle is defenseless against logging and land clearing. Its precarious population status, estimated at fewer than a thousand individuals, makes it one of the world's rarest raptors. Like many birds, the Philippine eagle often twists its head to change its visual perspective, gaining a better sense of a viewed object's size and distance. The species' blue-gray eyes are a rarity among raptors.
The 355-foot drop of Victoria Falls just inches away, a swimmer stands at the lip of a hidden pool—an eight-foot-deep divot in the riverbed drock—accessbile only when the Zambezi river runs low.
To honor 25 years of Terschelling island's Oerol theater festival, 2,000 people lined up along 25 giant rings of sand sculpted on the beach, in what artist Rob Sweere called "a silent conversation with the sky."
Butterflies spatter the shoreline of the Juruena River in Brazil's new 4.7-million-acre (2 million hectares) Juruena National Park. Several different species flock to the riverbanks to sip mineral salts from the sand.
With darkness closing in on snow leopards—habitat loss, poaching, loss of prey, lack of effective protection, and more—conservation groups are groping for ways to brighten up the species' future prospects. One ray of hope—a livestock vaccination program that changes the economic calculus for many farmers: If someone else pays to inoculate my herd, then fewer of my animals will die from disease. So when a snow leopard takes out one or two of my animals, I pledge not to reach for my rifle.
The cloud-scraping plateau of the Andes is an otherworldly realm where flamingos lift off from a lagoon warmed by hot springs and colored carnelian by algae.