20 stunning photos of unreal landscapes, incredible animals, and mesmerizing underwater scenes

Snow-covered metasequoia trees, also called dawn redwoods, interlace over a road in Takashima, Japan.

In Sydney, Australia, the Pacific Ocean at high tide breaks over a natural rock pool enlarged in the 1930s. Avoiding the crowds at the city’s many beaches, a local swims laps.

Migratory gulls take flight from a cedar tree being washed downstream by a glacial river in British Columbia, Canada.

Green vegetation blooms at the river's edge, or riparian, zone of a meandering canyon in Utah.

Two grey herons spar as a white-tailed eagle looks on in Hungary.

An adult Caribbean pink flamingo feeds a chick in Yucatán, Mexico. Both parents alternate feeding chicks, at first with a liquid baby food called crop milk, and then with regurgitated food.

A male orangutan peers from behind a tree while crossing a river in Borneo, Indonesia.

A Japanese macaque indulges in some grooming time on the shores of the famous hot springs.

A great gray owl swoops to kill in a New Hampshire field.

A summer thunderstorm unleashes lightning on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Sunlight glances off mineral strata of different colors in Dushanzi Grand Canyon, China.

Shortly before twilight in Kalapana, Hawaii, a fragment of the cooled lava tube broke away, leaving the molten rock to fan in a fiery spray for less than half an hour before returning to a steady flow.

Morning fog blurs the dead trees of Romania's Lake Cuejdel, a natural reservoir created by landslides.

Sunset illuminates a lighthouse and rainbow in the Faroe Islands.

Buoyed by the Gulf Stream, a flying fish arcs through the night-dark water five miles off Palm Beach, Florida.

Typically a shy species, a Caribbean reef shark investigates a remote-triggered camera in Cuba’s Gardens of the Queen marine protected area.

Blue-filtered strobe lights stimulate fluorescent pigments in the clear tentacles of a tube-dwelling anemone in Hood Canal, Washington.

Preparing to strike, tarpon cut through a ribbon-like school of scad off the coast of Bonaire in the Caribbean Sea.

A Portuguese man-of-war nears the beach on a summer morning; thousands of these jellyfish wash up on Australia's eastern coast every year.