Browse Items (1420 total)

The Black Sea coast has been constantly transformed. Omnipresent concrete, industrial zones or the iron waste by the sea don’t remind harmonic idyll between nature and man. People often change the landscape in a very brutal way and the sea fights…

Day breaks over a landscape that evokes the dawn of Earth itself, illuminating steam that seethes between ridges at the base of Mount Zubchatka, named for its jagged appearance. Such beauty is transcendent but vulnerable. Mount Zubchatka, and steam…

Bronzed in fall, ferns that surround a steaming mud pot in Uzon Caldera risk a scorching from spatter. Come spring, though, they’ll get an early start at growing as the heat quickly melts away winter’s thick cover of snow. Large mud pot at Uzon…

In another Uzon Caldera mud pot, a slurry of volcanic earth and superheated water burbles in endlessly changing patterns. Up to eight miles wide, Uzon simmers and hisses with over 500 geothermal features, including hot springs and steam vents. Mud…

Whipped into shape by winds gusting over snowcapped Kronotsky Volcano, stacked lenticular clouds blush in the last light of day. Among the world’s most perfectly cone-shaped peaks, the mountain last erupted in 1923. Kronotsky Volcano and…

Pearls of mist frame a bog star in a river-edge meadow, one of more than 750 plant species found in the reserve. Collecting is prohibited here, but in other parts of Russia, folk medicine prescribes infusions of bog star for intestinal illnesses. …

Rolling off Kronotsky Volcano, an autumn storm billows toward the tundra. This vast tweed of feathery grasses, red bearberries, and green crowberries attracts grazing reindeer, berrypicking bears, and curlews that swoop in by the thousands to strip…

Strong winds and heavy snows have kinked and twisted stone birches so dramatically that they have acquired the nickname 'drunken forest.' One tree even grows with its stunted trunk on the ground and its branches thrust skyward like arms in a…

Racing to pack on pounds before winter grips the reserve, a brown bear hunts for fruit in a blueberry patch reddened by September’s chill. Brown Bear feeding on blueberries, Uzon Caldera, Kronotsky Zapovednik, Kamchatka, Russia-MM7646

Born when a volcanic cone collapsed some 40,000 years ago, the Uzon Caldera continues to steam in places where magma heats the groundwater to a sizzle. No more than eight miles wide, the rock-rimmed crucible holds at least 500 geothermal features,…