Ansel Adams loved the area around Yosemite National Park so much that he called it “the great earth gesture,” as if Mother Nature had rewarded humanity with a prize. As history’s greatest landscape photographer, Adams knew a thing or two about stunning natural settings, but even his view was extremely limited. Had he been born a century later, chances are good that Adams would have photographed drop dead vistas from the Andes to the Australian Outback, but instead he confined his photography almost exclusively to the American West.
Gorgeous and diverse as the West is, Earth is a far, far larger place, full of landscapes that can be colorful, uniform and fitting to the eye, or just as easily, monotone, barren, misshapen and bizarre. Today, the kind of “great earth gestures,” Adams appreciated can be found on every continent.
Jokulsarlon, Iceland
This lagoon is home to incredible ice formations so curvaceous they appear to have been waves frozen solid instantly and then polished to a glimmering blue smoothness. The lagoon sits as a buffer between Europe’s largest glacier and the sea, and as a result there is constant calving of the ice, forming icebergs that eventually drift out to sea, so no matter how often you visit, the view is always different and always changing, sometimes dramatically. Earlier this year, a huge section of the Breidamerkurjökull glacier shattered and as a result, Jokulsarlon just became Iceland’s deepest lake.
Bryce Canyon, United States
Bryce Canyon is not technically a canyon at all, but rather the east slope of the Paunsaguant Plateau, though once you see it, this nitpicking hardly matters. The stunning vistas around its 37-mile loop road showcase the park’s signature feature: countless delicate red rock spires carved by millions of years of wind and water, known locally as “hoodoos.” Thanks to its famous lack of ambient light pollution and ultra-dark night sky, it is also a mecca for astronomers, with ranger-led programs on summer nights.
Chott El-Jarid, Tunisia
One of the world’s largest salt lakes, Chott El-Jarid is also a rare endorheic or terminal lake, a closed system whose waters never reach the sea. Instead, with annual rainfalls of under four inches and summer temperatures in excess of 120 degrees, the lake often evaporates completely, leaving an enormous salt pan covering roughly 2,000 square miles. Visitors who come to see this unique landscape may get more than they bargain for: When dry, Chott El-Jarid is famous for producing fata morgana, an optical mirage that conjures up visions of everything from castles to people.
Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina
In the Austral Andes near the Chilean border, Los Glaciares National Park has been a UNESCO World Heritage site for nearly 30 years. The park is devoted to glaciers, hence its name, and Perito Moreno is its most famous resident because of a unique nonstop cyclical action that causes this glacier to alternately advance and retreat. As part of this process, it is constantly calving, regularly producing spectacular ice falls from its exposed leading edge.
Olgas, Australia
Three dozen red domes erupting from the otherwise flat and barren Australian Outback are shocking enough to warrant their aboriginal name, “many heads.” The moving sun famously plays tricks with the earth’s color, and the Olgas can appear dramatically different based on the time of day. The Olgas are located in the same National Park, Uluru-Kata Tjuta, as more famous Ayers Rock, or Uluru, but the beauty of the Olgas is starkly different from its neighboring monolith. Plus, you can actually hike into the formation, through the internal Valley of the Winds, and see it up close and personal.
Tsingy de Bemaraha, Madagascar
So dense and needle-like are the worn limestone points comprising this natural preserve in Madagascar that it looks like nature’s version of a hairbrush. The earth has many examples of what geologists call karst topographies, where a layer of water soluble rock, usually limestone, dissolves over time causing fractures and sinkholes, but this is perhaps the most dramatic of them all. The barren stone spires are known locally as “tsingy,” hence the park’s name, but to the surprise of many visitors, the preserve also include vast wetlands, mangrove forests and a deep river valley, all teeming with wildlife.
Chocolate Hills, Philippines
The name of these unique mounds comes from the fact that the green grass covering them turns deep brown during the annual dry season, but is does not hurt that they bear a striking resemblance to Hershey Kisses. The stunner is how perfectly uniform each of the conical hills are, and inevitably, first-time visitors simply cannot believe they are not man-made. However, the scale of this construction project was best left to Mother Nature: There are too many of the hills to count — estimates range from over 1,200 to 1,700.
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