[imagesource:youtube]

This year, 165 photographers working on assignment for National Geographic shot more than 2.1 million images.

That’s an incredible feat already, but only 29 are featured in the magazine’s annual ‘Pictures of the Year’ retrospective.

The images are a collection of stunning moments that chronicle global culture, scientific breakthroughs, and nature’s most intimate happenings. According to National Geographic, the features contain “stunning photographs that unearth remarkable, rarely seen moments,” available to witness online now (if you’re a subscriber) or in the magazine’s December issue later.

We’ve scoured the internet to find some of the available images to gawk at and find awe in now.

In the highly prized cover photo, a close encounter with a sea krait, a highly venomous snake, was snapped by photographer Kiliii Yuyan near the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon in Palau, an island state between the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.

The creature is seen inside a Palau marine sanctuary, which protects a space larger than California with nearly 200,000 miles of water, per NY Post:

The sanctuary opened in 2015 and is the sixth-largest in the world. Although banded sea kraits – semiaquatic snakes of both the sea and land – carry one of the most lethal venoms in nature, they are considered remarkably docile and only infrequently have vicious interactions with humans, according to the Aquarium of the Pacific.

Yuyan said he wasn’t particularly afraid of the creature when trying to photograph it, “There are lots of ways to go in this world, and death by sea snake at least gives my family a good story to tell.”

Then, there’s a captivating image shot by Thomas Peschak showing indigenous Ticuna women in the Amazon wearing remarkable, pink dolphin costumes made from Yanchama tree bark.

It is a longstanding belief of the Ticuna that a pink dolphin is a charming man who goes to their festivals to get drunk and arouse the women, according to Vogue Italia. Per the myth, the enchanted women would go with him to the river, where they would then turn into dolphins themselves.

Then, try and figure this image out. Those are not leaves on trees,  they are butterflies.

Jaime Rojo, a senior fellow at the International League of Conservation Photographers, took this photo of branches sagging under the weight of countless monarch butterflies at El Rosario Sanctuary, one of many colonies in Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Every year, up to a billion monarch butterflies migrate to the reserve, before departing for Eastern Canada in the spring, according to UNESCO.

“During [this] time, four successive generations are born and die,” states UNESCO. “How they find their way back … remains a mystery.”

Incredible still, is how Yale researchers successfully reanimated dead brain tissue from a pig by combining it with a bevy of drugs and oxygen in this mysterious picture:

In 2019, neuroscientist Nenad Sestan discovered a way to partially resuscitate a pig’s brain hours after the pig had died.

Today, researchers at Yale use concentrated hemoglobin (in red) and a solution known as OrganEx (in blue) to restore organ functions shortly after the host has died, according to Yale. The procedure slows cell death, which researchers say could bring new hope to people awaiting organ transplants.

Then, Esther Horvath took this photo of the Reverend Siv Limstrand of the Church of Norway, who is the only pastor for the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, welcoming worshippers of any nationality and religion:

As the Arctic warms, Limstrand’s congregation of scientists and local people are chronicling, and coping with, climate change.

For more meaningful stills, visit Natgeo.com.

[source:cnbc]