Europe

Imagine a huge, river roaring down a rugged, winding Alpine valley, huge waves rearing, and deep troughs appearing. Suppose that, in an instant, it was frozen into a solid mass at the height of its violent movement. Then, in your mind's ...

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 ...

Beech, larch and towering conifers overhang the River Arazas as it hurries down steps and waterfalls through Ordesa Canyon. Above this looms a monumental backdrop of uncompromising ruggedness - walls of fluted limestone rising sheer from the valley of heights of ...

Even hardened travellers lapse into spellbound silence as ocean-going cruise liners, dwarfed by their surroundings to seem like model toys, glide into Sognefjord. The mountains rise almost vertically from the water's edge - sheer walls of strong granitic rock some 3000ft ...

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 ...

This untamed landscape of rugged, peaks, deep valleys and icy lakes and rivers, is known as the 'Last Great Wilderness. Human activity has hardly touched the central and eastern parts of Brooks Range - the tip of the Rocky Mountains that ...

As the shipwrecked but glamorous Jessica Lange approaches a towering, jungly island in the 1976 remake of King Kong, she murmurs silkily, 'I feel this is going to be the biggest thing in my life. A pedantic viewer might add: ' ...