incredible places

Every winter and spring, great white sharks that usually dwell off the coast of California gather in a remote section of ocean the size of Colorado — and scientists are slowly piecing together why.

Al Naslaa is a rock formation in Saudi Arabia's northwestern desert consisting of two huge, symmetrical stone blocks that are separated by a mysterious gap and sit on small pedestals.

In Racetrack Playa, a dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park, meteorological conditions can push rocks weighing up to 700 pounds along the flat ground.

The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon is Earth's largest terrestrial canyon, stretching 314 miles long and almost 20,000 feet from top to bottom at its deepest point in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The Salar de Uyuni desert is famous for its gleaming surface waters and hexagonal salt crust patterns, but below this otherworldly landscape lie about 11 million tons of highly sought-after lithium.

Lake Kivu, one of the African Great Lakes, sits along a tectonic plate boundary called the East African Rift, which is dotted with hot springs that feed carbon dioxide and methane into the water.

Scientists consider Last Chance Lake to be an analog for lakes that may have existed on Earth 4 billion years ago and contained the ingredients for early life on our planet.

Norway's photogenic "Dragon's Eye" likely formed around 20,000 years ago, when all of Scandinavia sat beneath an enormous mass of ice called the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet.

A 77-square-mile seagrass meadow at the bottom of Shark Bay in Western Australia is both Earth's largest plant and largest clone.

Geologists set Turkmenistan's Darvaza gas crater ablaze in 1971, thinking the fire would die down within a few weeks, but the pit is still burning 53 years later.