10.Polar bear gave her cub a lift as she swam across the fjord, shaking herself dry after emerging from the water with her cub hanging on.
9.The mighty weight of the entire Milky Way teeters precariously on Balanced Rock in Arches National Park.
8.Radiant at sunrise, the Matterhorn towers over Riffel Lake near Zermatt, Switzerland.
7.This is a time exposure of four lightning strikes over Scottsdale, Arizona.
6.A layer of low clouds covers the alpine valleys of northern Italy, just south of Lake Como. The clouds are just dense enough to hide uniformly the valley and also filter the artificial lights below like they were an opaque blanket.
5.This is a photograph of the reflection of El Capitan in the Merced River in winter in Yosemite National Park.
4.Main Spring in Badab Sourt in wintertime. Badab Sourt Spring is in the city of Sari in Iran, in the Alborz mountains,
3.The slim sun of February heats the ground waiting for the spring.
2.Kate Rutherford can't hear a thing while climbing so close to the roar of Yosemite Falls. She can't find much to hang on to either. The water polishes the rock "like glass." Wearing tape on her hands, she has to repeatedly jam them into fissures for the ascent.The climbing route is called Freestone, Rutherford says, because "it's a peach of a route."
1. It's seen here displaying the classic defensive posture that gives it the common name "cottonmouth."