None of these pictures are Photoshoped or edited. All of them are pictures taken by photographers. There are plenty more cool picture in the National Geographic website, I only chose the ones that amazed me. (Read the descriptions of each pic, in case if you want to know more about each of them.) :D
Photograph by Jay Fine
In New York Harbor the Statue of Liberty weathers a lightning storm against the sparkle of the New Jersey shore. Although this bolt missed the monument, a few are estimated to strike Lady Liberty each year.
Photograph by Olivier Grunewald
The blue flame of burning sulfur flickers near a miner on Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java. The pungent element is mined near the crater’s highly acidic lake for such industrial uses as rubber and sugar processing.
Photograph by Christopher Swann
Mexico,
Surfacing in warm winter waters off the Baja California coast, a gray whale flashes its baleen plates by a boat. The area's lagoons and bays provide breeding and calving grounds for the giants, which migrate from as far north as the Bering Sea.
Photograph by Kathy ParkerRobe,
Australia
"Living on a farm in South Australia," says Parker, 31, "we find a lot of blue-tongue lizards in our yard. This one came to our back door courtesy of Tiger, our son's cat, who bravely brings us all sorts of amazing creatures—alive and unharmed—for inspection and approval."
Photograph Alex Saberi
United Kingdom—A lone mute swan stretches its wings upon a brook as the mists of dawn filter through London's Richmond Park. By tradition, the British monarch has the right to claim ownership of unmarked birds of this species in open water.
Photograph by Madison Hall
A dew-bathed juvenile
leopard takes a peaceful moment atop a fallen tree on a wintry South African morning. Compared with other African game, leopards are famously shy and rarely seen, partially because of their largely nocturnal hunting habits. Leopards number among many other species of top predators whose population numbers are falling due to human impacts, making this a special sighting of a rare animal that is both powerful and extraordinarily gorgeous.
Photograph by Jose Cardona
At a Maui aquarium a Hawaiian
green turtle makes a guest appearance. Members of this threatened species are unique among sea turtles for their herbivorous diet, thought to imbue their fat with a greenish hue.
Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic
An oceanic whitetip shark and diver swim in the
Bahamas.
Photograph by Stephen Alvarez, National Geographic
Decken's sifakas appear right at home in their karst home in western Madagascar. These lemurs live among the unusual pinnacles of the Tsingy de Bemaraha, which started to form 1.8 million years ago as groundwater dissolved and shaped the porous limestone.
Photograph by Meta Penca
A bear stretching it's legs.
Mimmi the brown bear shows her flair for flexibility during an afternoon stretch at the Ähtäri Zoo. Despite intense summer heat, the lively resident lifted paws for minutes at a time in poses she learned from her mother.
Photograph by Jonathan Blair, National Geographic
A year-old Nile crocodile attempts to snap up a frog in the St. Lucia Estuary. Part of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, which UNESCO named a World Heritage site in 1999, the protected area is Africa’s largest estuarine system.
Photograph by Chia Ming Chien
Singapore,
The vertiginous "infinity pool" at the Marina Bay Sands resort offers a sweeping view of Singapore, a country that's achieved success while building up instead of out.
Photograph by Steve Winter
A tiger peers at a camera trap it triggered while hunting in the early morning in the forests of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Tigers can thrive in many habitats, from the frigid Himalaya to tropical mangrove swamps in India and Bangladesh.
Photograph by Jim Richardson
The fallow deer in the park at Knole, Kent, have looked down at the world with long-nosed lordliness since the days of King James. The grandeur of this aristocratic style seeped into every corner of King James's England—and into the language used by the translators of his Bible. It was an age in which social hierarchy was considered a reflection of the divine order of the universe.
Here, in Dubai, natural and man-made electricity illuminate the night. As jagged needles of lightning darn an overcast sky, the sail-shaped, 1,053-foot-tall (321-meter) Burj Al Arab hotel glows green on the edge of the Persian Gulf.
