Incredible places: A window onto extraordinary landscapes on Earth

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.

This stagnant brine pool at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is so toxic it kills and embalms any crabs and amphipods that are unlucky enough to stumble into it.

Iron-rich waters buried beneath Taylor Glacier in East Antarctica are sporadically released in what looks like a bloody mess — but the so-called Blood Falls aren't as gruesome as they first appear and sound.

The Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat structure, stands out like an oversized ammonite among the sand dunes of the Sahara desert in Mauritania.

China's southwestern karst landscape is pockmarked with dozens of enormous sinkholes that look like they were made with a cookie cutter — and scientists keep finding new ones.

Snake Island was isolated from the Brazilian mainland at the end of the last ice age, trapping Earth's only known population of highly venomous golden lancehead pit vipers on a rock in the Atlantic.