Australia

Nothing but the sighing and moaning of the world breaks the eerie silence of the Pinnacles Desert. Any science-fiction writer seeking a setting for a spine-chiller needs to look no further than this alien spot not far from the coast of ...

Every summer's day in Glacier Bay resounds to the crash and splash of falling masses of ice, some the size of buildings. They are breaking off from the towering walls of ice that meet the frigid waters of the bay, which ...

Disbelief is a constant companion to those who explore Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. So far, around 101 miles (156.5km) of caverns and passageways have desert mountains in the southern United States, making it one of the world's longest caves. Within ...

Wind-clown sands have sculpted the domed, elephantine bulk of Uluru, which rises abruptly from the flat and arid plains of the Northern Territory, almost at the very centre of Australia. To the Aborigines, the age-old red rock known as; Uluru' has ...

Source Seen from the air, the glistening pale pink surface of remote Lake Hillier looks like glace icing on an oblong cake. The lake gives unexpected colour to a densely wooded corner of Middle Island, one of more than 100 small islands ...

In 1870, a Kansas schoolboy read a short article - in the newspaper wrapped around his lunch - about a lake that lay high in the Oregon mountains, encircled by sheer walls and containing an extinct volcano. The article triggered William ...

Carved by glaciers and fretted by frost, the extraordinary rock skyline of the dolomites looks like vast battlements, needles, towers and walls. This mountain range in northeast Italy is a series of light-coloured limestone ridges separated by green valleys, and rivalling ...

Despite its name, Lake Eyre is barely a lake at all, but rather two huge, shallow scoops in the thirsty heartland of Australia. Its salt-caked floor is dry most of the time, and a rim of thick, encrusted minerals hangs like ...

The granite domes of the Drakensberg range of mountains in South Africa's Transvaal rise above the twisting valleys of the Blyde River Canyon, their summits separated by terrifying ravines. Below, rivers and streams run through a tranquil landscape, bypassing old prospectors' ...

While dinosaurs forage in the green heart of Australia, a huge fireball plunges into the plain, shattering the landscape with a force hundreds of thousands of times greater than that of the nuclear bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima ...

Once upon a time, the Twelve Apostles - the huge rock stacks that stand offshore near Port Campbell in south-east Australia - were part of the jagged limestone cliffs. These stacks have resisted thousands of years of battering by relentless seas ...

The noise is deafening, the smell overpowering, but at least they are all smartly dressed. This is one of the world's largest gatherings of penguins, and it takes place on a tiny island 1100 miles (1800km) east of the tip of ...