At a gathering of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society in a pub in 2008, caver Charlie Self PhD student Gina Moseley a photograph of a cave in a limestone cliff just beyond the north-western edge of the Greenland ice sheet. Thought to be the northernmost cave in the world, it had been photographed from a US military aircraft in 1958, but never explored.

But Self also gave Moseley a report about calcite flowstone, formed by trickling water, that was found in a cave in north-eastern Greenland. Today, groundwater there is frozen in permafrost, so this flowstone must have come from a warmer, wetter time. A sample could provide a climate record exceeding the 130,000 years in Greenland ice cores, Moseley thought.

Starting in 2015, Moseley and her partner, photographer Robbie Shone, mounted four expeditions to Greenland, finally reaching that northernmost known cave, pictured above. While they didn’t find any flowstone there, they did obtain some from caves in north-eastern Greenland that showed the ground there hadn’t frozen – and vegetation had even grown – during three periods between 5 million and 10 million years ago.

It was a snapshot of a past world, but also a warning about how drastically global warming could alter Greenland in the future.

“This occurred in a world with CO2 levels that we already surpassed several decades ago,” says Moseley.

In the top image, expedition member Chris Blakeley stands in the entrance of the northernmost known cave, found on the Wulff Land peninsula, after rappelling down. Below, Blakeley explores a cave in north-eastern Greenland named Crystal Palace for the hoarfrost on its ceiling.

Below, Blakeley sits in Keyhole cave, named for the shape of its entrance, where the team collected two flowstone samples.

Shone calls the caves “time machines” that may be some of the last unexplored places on Earth, as there are no current Inuit settlements in north-eastern Greenland. But the team nonetheless witnessed the effects of human-made climate change there, including summer temperatures of 16°C.

“By early evening, after a full day of sunshine on the ice cap, the rivers were huge, they were bursting and they were brown,” says Shone. “You could physically see how much water had melted on the ice cap.”

Below, the team explores another cave in the area, after a 6-metre vertical climb to get into it. A huge coating of blue ice was found on the cave’s back wall.

In the final image, below, Blakeley and researcher Gabriella Koltai scramble to board a helicopter hovering near a cave in the Wulff Land peninsula before a storm arrives. The team named the cave R66 after the model of helicopter that rushed them out of there.

This unusual photograph, shot under ultraviolet light with a 13-second exposure, shows some of the damage caused on land by fishing out at sea.

Gaurav Patil’s image of a fishing net that has been carried by ocean currents and become tangled in a mangrove tree on the shore of Nandgaon village, south of Mumbai, India, has won the overall prize in the 2026 . The competition is organised by US non-profit organisation Mangrove Action Project to raise awareness of the precarious position of the world’s mangrove forests.

Mangroves less than 1 per cent of all tropical forests, but provide crucial habitat for wildlife and store up to 10 times more carbon than the same area of inland forest. Despite better recent news after decades of decline, more than half of mangrove ecosystems are to be at .

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lost, abandoned and discarded fishing gear litter the oceans, carried around the globe by currents and eventually getting caught up or breaking down into microplastics. This gear can severely damage mangrove ecosystems, entangling marine life and choking mangrove trees.

“This photographer has put life into a subject that normally looks dull but is deeply important for conservation. Ghost nets are a real problem,” said judge Dhritiman Mukherjee in an announcement about the prize.

“Most people are completely unaware of what is in the water,” says Julian Cremona, a naturalist and photographer who is out to change that with his new book.

Plankton is an umbrella term for all kinds of different organisms floating in our waters, from plants, known as phytoplankton, to animals, known as zooplankton. They can be as little as 0.02 micrometres, the size of some viruses, or as big as 2 metres, the size of a large jellyfish. What they have in common is that they aren’t powerful enough to overcome the movement of water, unlike organisms that can resist the current. As Cremona writes, plankton are “drifting organisms that are unable to determine their long-term direction and are at the whims of the current”.

Cremona’s book is a guide to the different types of plankton found along the British coast, such as the larva of a Magelona worm, just 2 millimetres in size, in the main image. To take this photograph, Cremona fitted objective lenses from an old microscope to his camera.

Below is a shot of a tiny zooplankter, Oikopleura. Its body is made up of a trunk on top of a long tail, ranging from a few millimetres to a centimetre long. It has a lifespan of five to six days, over which it grows, reproduces and finally dies.

Some larger plankton are shown below, including a handful of compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella), which are mostly found in northern Europe. The umbrella of this jellyfish can stretch to 30 centimetres in diameter, and it uses its 24 tentacles to catch its food: small fish, crabs and other jellyfish.

Pictured below is a swarm of moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), the most common jellyfish to be found in the UK’s waters.

Some phytoplankton exhibit symbiosis with jellyfish and sea anemones, such as the aptly named snakelocks anemone (Anemonia viridis), pictured below. Single-celled Symbiodinium plankton live within the tissue of its green tentacles, where they perform photosynthesis and provide their host with carbohydrates. In return, the plankton receive inorganic carbon, nitrogen, phosphate – and a protected refuge in which to live.

Climate and health activist has been immortalised in a sculpture, The Solomon Siren – recently installed on her now-flooded former home: Kale Island in the Solomon Islands.

Rising tides completely flooded the 50,000-square-metre Pacific island in 2016. The sculpture sits in the intertidal zone, where patches of rubble and sand rise above the ocean surface from time to time.

Sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor made the sculpture as part of his Sirens series of installations around the world highlighting warming seas, sewage pollution and the presence of microplastics.

When flooding made life untenable, Bartlett and her family had to evacuate to one of the main islands. “Back then, [the island] was land – green, vibrant, full of life,” says Bartlett in a film accompanying the sculpture’s installation. “Kale became one of the first documented islands in the Solomons lost to sea level rise.”

The sculpture consists of a marine-grade stainless steel tree on which a life-sized figure of Bartlett leans. The artwork also uses biochar and pH-neutral cement. Hauntingly, as the tide rises and falls, it is intermittently hidden as waves roll over.

Incorporated into the sculpture are inscriptions recording past milestones of Kale’s submergence along with predictions for a sea level rise of up to 20 centimetres by 2046. But as Taylor says, the sculpture isn’t intended to work as a scientific measuring instrument, but as a “symbolic representation” of a changing relationship between land and sea.

“What happened is a warning not only for us, but for the world,” says Bartlett.

After the British ship Endurance (pictured above) became stuck in an ice sheet in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica in January 1915, the expedition’s official photographer, Frank Hurley, made a brave decision. He waded into the icy water filling the lower deck to rescue hundreds of his precious glass-plate photo negatives.

To Hurley’s dismay, Ernest Shackleton, the expedition leader, informed him he would have to abandon most of the negatives because they would weigh down their escape lifeboats. Hurley went through the plates one by one and smashed 400 of them on the ice before he could change his mind and risk his life to return for them, salvaging 120.

Hurley also had to relinquish most of his photography equipment and rely on a pocket camera and a few rolls of film to capture the crew’s fight for survival as they camped on the ice near their trapped ship for months. “It is beyond conception, even to us, that we are dwelling on a colossal ice raft, with but five feet of ice separating us from 2,000 fathoms of ocean, and drifting along under the caprices of wind and tides, to heaven knows where,” wrote Hurley in his diary.

The Endurance sank for good in November 1915. After months camped on the ice, in April 1916, Hurley and the rest of the crew took his fragile photo negatives and remaining supplies on lifeboats to the uninhabited Elephant Island. From there, realising there was little chance of rescue, Shackleton and five men took the James Caird lifeboat (pictured below) on a perilous journey of 1200 kilometres across the Southern Ocean to seek rescue in South Georgia, eventually rescuing the men (including Hurley) who had remained on Elephant Island in August 1916.

While stranded on the ice sheet in the Weddell Sea, Hurley proved to be a hardy survivor, fashioning a blubber stove from an old drum and eating the expedition’s sledge dogs when food supplies ran short. Pictured below is Leonard Hussey lifting the largest sledge dog, Samson.

Hurley, an Australian photographer, was recruited for the expedition to Antarctica after Shackleton saw a film he had made of Douglas Mawson’s earlier Australasian Antarctic Expedition, for which he was also the official photographer. Unfortunately, the Shackleton expedition never succeeded in crossing the Antarctic continent.

Now, the UK’s Royal Geographical Society, in collaboration with Shackleton’s granddaughter and others, has published (Riverside Press), a compilation of Hurley’s images that survived. It features the original glass-plate negatives alongside new, high-definition scans that uncover previously hidden faces and details, such as in the image below. Digitisation of the negative revealed a sixth crew member, hidden behind the smoke from the stove.

“The survival of these negatives through such a journey in such conditions to reach the safety of the Royal Geographical Society’s collections is extraordinary,” says the society’s president, Jane Francis, in the book. “[Hurley’s] images are an example of documentary photography at its finest. He was committed to his craft and would often put himself in danger to create the perfect image. Each of his negatives is not just a visual record of a particular moment, but a beautifully composed, carefully considered piece of art.”

The otherworldly weirdness and beauty of fungi and slime moulds are captured in these photographs, taken by Jay Lichter for his new book , a guide to the “micro marvels” of New Zealand.

The ruby bonnet fungus (Cruentomycena viscidocruenta), pictured above, gets its scientific name from the Latin words for “bloody” and “slimy” because of the sticky substance coating its stalk, which can form large droplets. “The reflections you get in these globules from a diffused flash make for an awesome shot every time, so I never get sick of shooting them,” writes Lichter.

Below is the Cribraria slime mould, which is a protist, like certain algae and amoebas.

Below is the carnival candy slime mould (Arcyria denudata), named for the pink tufts it forms during its fruiting phase. It is only 4 to 6 millimetres tall.

Lichter discovered the relatively uncommon fungus Mycena lividorubra (below) under a log in New Zealand’s Waitākere Ranges.

And finally, below is another Mycena mushroom – though this one has been targeted by mould, “almost like a bridal veil”, Lichter writes. “But that’s not all! The mould in this photo is producing droplets of guttation (excess moisture) along its threads, making for an absolutely wild shot,” he adds.

Lichter hopes to inspire readers to discover the secret life of fungi themselves. Moss and rotten wood in the forest are your best bet, but Lichter has also found stunning specimens in car parks and vacant lots. “Even the most unassuming locations are exploding with fungal life,” he writes.

Jay Lichter
Allen & Unwin Aotearoa NZ

If you are a new mother and unable to breastfeed, few places are better than Brazil when it comes to getting assistance. Milk banks, which collect donated breast milk and distribute it to mothers and babies in need, have existed since the early 20th century, but they were frequently expensive and not widely accessible. But in the 1980s, João Aprígio Guerra de Almeida, a young chemist, worked with Brazilian public health officials to redesign the country’s milk banks from the ground up, using cheap, creative solutions like repurposing hot water baths from the food industry that were 10 times cheaper than standard pasteurisation machines, or sterilising coffee and mayonnaise jars so they could be reused as milk bottles.

The Brazilian word for this imaginative problem-solving is jeitinho, says photographer , who, with the journalist Niklas Franzen, visited and reported on several of Brazil’s milk banks, like the Fernandes Figueira Institute in Rio de Janeiro.

Today, Brazil’s milk-bank system is frequently cited as one of the world’s best, providing some of the world’s cheapest and safest breast milk. It operates at a vast scale, with more than 200 milk banks – the most in the world – serving hundreds of thousands of babies. Brazil saw a more than 70 per cent drop in mortality of children under 5 from 1990 to 2015, which credited at least in part to its milk bank system.

On top of its efficiency, part of the reason for the system’s success is that it makes it easy for women to freely donate and receive milk, supported by a network of courier drivers who crisscross the country. One of these drivers can be seen delivering milk by bike in Flamengo, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro (above). “We spoke to one donor, and she said, if it wasn’t for a courier to pick up her milk, she wouldn’t do it, it would just not be possible,” says Bethge. “This would be really nice for Europe and for other countries”, to adopt, she adds.

The milk banks themselves are also multipurpose facilities, acting as holistic support centres for new mothers, collecting milk, sterilising and storing it, as well as supplying it directly to premature babies in need. All milk is first checked for large contaminating detritus, such as hair or dust, that would result in a sample being rejected (above). The milk is then warmed up and liquefied in a water bath (below), so that it can undergo more rigorous tests to ensure that it is free of biological contaminants (main image, top).

Women can also receive assistance from nurses to help express milk for their babies if they are in need, such as in wards for premature births (below).

“You see the whole circle, from the woman who was delivering [the milk] to the baby who gets it,” says Bethge.

Poaching and a changing climate forced the northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita) out of the northern foothills of the Alps around 400 years ago. But now they are on their way back.

This photograph shows Helena Wehner flying in the passenger seat of an ultralight aircraft, singing a German song through a megaphone to guide the birds on their way to their new winter homes. Wehner, behind pilot Johannes Fritz, is part of an Austrian conservation group known as Waldrappteam – named after the ibis’s local name – which is trying to establish a healthy European population once more.

The birds are hand-raised by human carers and form bonds, which means they are happy to follow people even when they are riding in the aircraft. Since its inception in 2004, the migration project has amassed numerous followers and fans from local communities along the birds’ route. The 50-day journey covers 2800 kilometres from south-east Germany to south-west Spain.

The stunning shot of the formation flying over the olive groves of Jaén in the south of Spain was taken by student Gunnar Hartmann and won him the overall top spot in . Hartmann joined the conservation team as a volunteer in 2024 while a science undergraduate at the University of Koblenz in Germany. In an announcement about the awards, Hartmann said the image brought up “so many emotions” for him. “I can smell the air from this day and imagine the sounds,” he added.

Other winning photographs in the Scientist At Work competition include this image from deep in the Red Sea off the Saudi Arabian coast, below, taken by marine biologist Uli Kunz. It shows scientists installing an incubation chamber over a coral reef ecosystem. The project aims to understand how different corals – Acropora here – react to rising water temperatures caused by climate change by measuring their oxygen output.

The winning image below, taken by Robert Harcourt, shows biologist Michael Doane holding his breath and diving down to carefully skim the skin of a whale shark (Rhincodon typus) with a syringe at Ningaloo Reef off the coast of Western Australia, collecting a sample of the microorganisms that dwell there.

Another winning aquatic image, this time shot from above, shows algal blooms on Dog Lake in Ontario, Canada. The Microcystis aeruginosa and Dolichospermum flos-aquae create a “toxic, vile-smelling layer of rot” on the lake each summer, according to photographer Haolun (Allen) Tian, a PhD student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. The thick green bloom kills fish and clogs water supplies. The boat in the image, shown below, contains scientists taking water samples for environmental DNA analysis.

Finally, photographer Shayanta Chowdhury captures an entomologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana observing a yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) under a microscope, below. Scientists are studying how the drug nitisinone can be used to kill blood-feeding insects, and the mosquito has been fed a sugar mixture spiked with both the drug and a fluorescent dye.