Photographer Page

Olivier Grunewald

An estimated 50 million bison once roamed the United States, but after a mass slaughter—an attempt to starve Native Americans—just 600 bison remained by 1875. Today the species has been restored to over 5,000 individuals in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

Hardy Reef is one of thousands that make up Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Earth’s largest structure built by living organisms. It abounds with sponges, which appeared in the oceans about 600 million years ago. Human activity threatens the delicate ecosystem.

Every October, whooper swans (Cygnus cygnus) in Siberia take to the skies to escape extreme temperatures, as low as minus 50 degrees. After a 3,800-kilometer, nonstop 18-hour migration, they arrive in more temperate Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.

The Hoh Rainforest, in the heart of Olympic National Park in Washington State, is one of the last remaining temperate rainforests in North America and a true feast for the eyes. Many different forms of life proliferate under its draping of conifers, mosses, and ferns.

These quiver trees in Namibia are favored by the San people, who hollow out branches to make cases for their arrows. The trees, under threat by rising temperatures, have broad canopies that provide an ideal communal nesting place for weavers.

Around five million years ago, the Colorado River carved out this sandstone escarpment, aptly named Horseshoe Bend, near the town of Page, Arizona.

At dawn, a thin cloud lingers over Uluru, a sandstone outcropping in the heart of Australia, formed over 500 million years ago. At 863 meters high, this rock, sacred to the area’s Aboriginal people, stands out in the vast expanse of the Northern Territory.

On primeval Earth, volcanic rock formed rafts of terrestrial crust, such as these patches in a caldera of bubbling lava in the Nyiragongo volcano, located in the Virunga Mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Icy fragments float on Iceland’s glacial lake Jökulsárlón under the magical aurora borealis. The northern lights appear when the solar wind collides with Earth’s magnetosphere—which shields the planet from solar radiation—and travels along it, producing a display at high latitudes.

The glow of sunrise washes over the cliff at Toroweap Point, in the heart of Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park. Cross-sections of the canyon, an immense gorge carved by the Colorado River, reveal two billion years of geological history.