Tidal bores in this area can reach up to 30 feet in height and move as fast as 25 miles per hour. In the scene above, captured by photographer Xu Kangping, surprised onlookers rush to escape the downpour of muddy river water.

German landscape photographer Andreas Wonisch hiked up to the Italian Dolomites with six other photographers. But they’d grossly underestimated the trek: the nearest accommodation was a kilometer away and up a steep trail. In order to catch a sunrise shot, the group needed to hike up for longer than an hour through pitch-black midnight with all their gear. Of the seven, only one didn’t back out. Wonisch was not among them:

The next year, Wonisch returned to the same spot—the same mountain, the same accommodation. Only this time, he was prepared. Here’s the story, via his Flickr page:

“When I woke up in the middle of the night it was pitch black and there was thick fog. You couldn’t see for more than 10 meters. But I knew that I at least had to try this time. Luckily I already knew the way up and arrived in time half an hour before sunrise. At this point I felt that all the effort was in vain because it was still extremely foggy. But just before the sun came out the fog suddenly lifted and unveiled the majestic mountaintops. It felt like a great breakthrough and I quickly took as many photos as I could. A few minutes later everything was again covered in fog. But I went happily back to the hut—knowing, that I finally had captured the photo I wanted.”

We’ve all seen thousands of sunrise and sunset photos and, no doubt, we’ve all taken a few of our own. I mean, how can you resist? There’s just something so magical when the sun cuts across the horizon, or through a beautiful, natural landscape like the one seen below. Photographer Evgeni Dinev perfectly portrays the mystic, magical sense that the early morning sun can bring in his photo of a Bulgarian sunrise cutting through the morning mist:

Imagine a climate where it gets so cold that boiled water turns to ice in an instant. That’s what life is like way up in the Canadian arctic. Nature and landscape photographer Michael H. Davies lives on Baffin Island, in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, and captured this shot of his friend throwing tea in -40 degree Celsius weather. As the hot water hit the freezing air, it turned to ice particles, leaving a beautiful icy spray in the sunset:

Porcella’s friend, Max Haim, captured this unique and amazing shot. How’s that for an environmental portrait?

Can you tell what planet this is? Photographer Stéphane Vetter hopes you guessed Venus or Jupiter, but he, in fact, grabbed this eerie shot on Earth. The photos was taken from Iceland’s geothermal Hverir, a northeastern area rich with boiling mudpools and fumaroles (a.k.a. fumes rising from cracks in the Earth’s crust):

It must have been a crisp night, because the ghostly green of the aurora borealis is lively in the background. Vetter calls this shot “Night on a Spooky Planet”, and he has expertly captured the essence of a truly foreign land with a long exposure, complete with hints of a green reflection in the water itself.