When , a teacher in New Plymouth, New Zealand, got into astrophotography six years ago, satellites occasionally appeared in his photos. But now, “almost every night-sky photograph I take contains multiple satellite trails”, he says.

To raise awareness of how clogged our skies are becoming, Larsen pointed his camera at Mount Taranaki in New Zealand for almost 2 hours. Afterwards, he spent 45 hours combining the 578 8-second exposures that his camera took during that time to make one image. “I wanted to create an image that would show people, in a single photograph, just how dramatically our night sky is changing,” he says.

The main picture, above, is the composite of all 578 exposures and contains an estimated 14,000 satellite trails. The picture below is a single 8-second exposure, with a few satellite trails.

That doesn’t mean 14,000 satellites flew past in 2 hours, because individual satellites appeared in multiple exposures. But the image does illustrate the large volume of satellites now orbiting us. For example, over 9000 satellites have been deployed by SpaceX since 2019 to deliver its Starlink internet service.

Larsen is concerned about the potential environmental impacts of satellites, from disruption of nocturnal animals like bats and moths to impacts on Earth’s atmosphere as the satellites burn up during re-entry at the end of their lifespans. “I recognise that satellites provide valuable services… but I think we need to take the potential long-term environmental consequences of these enormous satellite constellations seriously,” he says.

SpaceX’s Starlink dodged 300,000 satellite collisions in 2025

The company’s mega-constellation is having to perform a huge number of manoeuvres to prevent a collision in Earth orbit

These beautiful photos capture how a remote island community safely shepherds its rare seabirds to the ocean.

The Azores hosts three-quarters of the global population of Cory’s shearwaters, which nest in burrows and clifftops around the Atlantic archipelago. Chicks stay in their nests all spring and summer until they have grown big enough to attempt their first flight, seen in the image above.

Once ready, the young birds take flight by night to avoid predators, using the moon and stars to navigate to the ocean. But it isn’t just predators these birds should be wary of, photographer Andrea Zanenga discovered when he visited Corvo. The tiny Portuguese island has just 430 human inhabitants, but is home to the world’s largest colony of Cory’s shearwaters.

During their fledging window in late October and early November, the young shearwaters are easily confused by artificial lights. The seabirds can’t take off from ground level, so if they crash, they remain stuck on the ground, vulnerable to attack or starvation.

“These are young birds, 3 months old, and most of them are doing their first flight,” says Tânia Pipa, a marine biologist at the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds.

“They get lost. If you have a point with light pollution, they see it as guidance and go to that place, and get disorientated.” On the worst nights, Corvo residents might find dozens of stranded birds on the streets of the island’s only settlement, Vila do Corvo.

An Azores-wide campaign known as SOS Cagarro was launched in 1995 to rescue fallen shearwaters. Volunteers join night walks to spot stranded birds and place them in artificial nests (above).

The birds are released the following day from nearby clifftops.

But the residents of Corvo have gone one better. For five nights during the peak fledging season, all public lighting in Vila do Corvo is switched off from 9pm until midnight to help the birds navigate safely out to the ocean.

Corvo is the only island in the Azores to operate such a self-imposed blackout, leaving it free of light pollution. “When you see this sky with a lot of stars, you feel a little bit smaller,” says Zanenga.

For Aindreas Scholz, there is a contradiction at the heart of environmental photography. Photos of landscapes “can sometimes aestheticise environmental damage while remaining materially distant and separate from it”, he says, while photography itself consumes water and produces waste.

“I do not want to make work about ecological responsibility while pretending that the photographic printing process is somehow outside that problem,” says Scholz.

His latest project tackles this contradiction head on through the medium of cameraless photography. The image above, The Most Beautiful Anthropocene #53, was made while Scholz was at an artist residency in France. Using 19th-century lumen and cyanotype printing techniques, he took already-exposed photographic dark-room paper, water from a nearby pond and plants from a local flower meadow to create the work.

“What you are looking at is the physical trace of plants and environmental conditions acting directly on a photographic material,” says Scholz.

The image is part of an bringing together two of his bodies of work, And So I Watch You From Afar and The Most Beautiful Anthropocene, at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, UK, until 18 January 2027. Part of this year’s , the installation sees Scholz explore how ecologically sustainable cameraless photography can provide a record of environmental change, from plant life to coastal edges, focusing on environments affected by humans.

“Rather than photographing a landscape from a distance, I bring the photographic surface into direct contact with environmental conditions and materials, sunlight, water, seawater, rainwater, plants, salt, soil, residues and atmosphere,” says Scholz.

“That distinction is important to me,” he says. “I am less interested in making a photograph of climate change than in asking whether a photographic printing process can itself be materially affected by the same environmental conditions that the work is trying to address.”

Do you have any idea what you’re looking at in the image above? It might look completely abstract at first glance, but this is, in fact, an aerial photo. The white cobwebby-looking bits are bubbles, the green is algae and the straight lines are the edges of tanks.

This is the Kasslerfeld sewage-treatment plant in Duisburg, Germany, next to the Rhine river, which treats wastewater from nearby businesses and homes.

“This is part of my series which illustrates environmental damage in a creative way to engage viewers,” says photographer and environmental activist J Henry Fair.

While wastewater plants help minimise human impact on rivers, Fair points out that they don’t remove all pollutants. For instance, they don’t filter out all microplastics. We all have microplastics in our bodies, Fair says, but the ramifications of that are not understood.

Fair has been using small aircraft to document the impact of human activity on the landscape, with the aerial view often revealing much that can’t be seen from the ground. The photograph above is one from a new exhibition at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, .

“I first photographed it in passing, then the curators became excited about it, so I went back to reshoot it. But then could not find it. So we flew all around Duisburg, and finally saw it as we were giving up the search,” said Fair.

Waste features in many of Fair’s photographs. The strange red landscape in the image below is made of the toxic mud left after aluminium is refined from bauxite in Gramercy, Louisiana. The two lines are vehicle tracks. The waste contains heavy metals such as lead and mercury, among other things.

Another alien-looking landscape in the image below is actually the waste treatment at a pulp mill in Ticonderoga, New York state. Trout in nearby Lake Chamberlaindangerous levels of dioxins as a result of historical pollution from factories including the original paper mill at Ticonderoga.

What looks like blood in the shot below is actually molten sulphur being added to large piles of solid yellow sulphur in Fort McMurray, Canada. The sulphur is a byproduct of the tar sands refining process and is stored on-site because there is little demand for it. Fair points out that the petrol (gasoline) made from tar sands results in much higher carbon emissions than that made from oil.

And does the image below show a peaceful Zen garden? No. This is actually earth from a lignite mine in Grefath, Germany. The earth is removed to reveal the lignite – a particularly dirty form of coal – around 100 metres down, and then transferred to areas where the coal has already been stripped.

Fair’s exhibition at the Bruce Museum runs until 7 February.

This dramatic shot of a northern gannet diving for prey bested 24,000 other images to win the overall prize in the .

The photo was taken off Shetland, UK, as the bird hunted for fish to feed its offspring. When gannets spot fish, they turn to fly into the wind, stretch out their wings as brakes, precisely adjust their position and then dive-bomb into the water with wings tucked at speeds of up to 86 kilometres per hour.

They have evolved to handle this dramatic moment, with muscles that lock their vertebrae into position, air sacs in the face and chest to protect from impact, and nostrils that prevent jets of water entering.

“The handsome northern gannets lead a dualistic existence,” said Spiers in an announcement about the win. “In the nest, their newborn is carefully nurtured, and a couple’s bond is reinforced by pointing sharp beaks to the sky as they tenderly stroke their white necks together. In flight, hunting mode takes over, and piercing yellow eyes, fringed with blue circles, scour the sea for prey.”

Spiers had been diving in the chilly, 10°C (50°F) waters of Shetland when he realised the sun was visible from his position under the sea. “Even in summer, sunshine is far from guaranteed in this remote British archipelago, so my creative engine started firing when the sunball was visible from underwater. I envisioned the shot of the gannet diving straight through the middle of it, and dedicated my entire dive to capturing that single frame,” he says. “The gannets were diving all around me, but I refused to be distracted and kept my camera pointed at the sun. After a long wait, a gannet finally dived through in the perfect spot and I met the bird as it careened under the sea. The moment was over in a split second.”

A bronze award in the prize’s portrait category was given to David Stowe, who captured this western parotia (Parotia sefilata), below, dancing in the dark rainforest of West Papua, Indonesia, in a dazzling attempt to attract a female.

Donald Chin photographed this protective tawny frogmouth (Podargus strigoides), shown below, near Perth in Australia. As rain falls in the forest, this fledgling seems to raise a wing to cover its siblings. Chin won a gold award in the “bird behaviour” category of the prize.

The below image by Alex Pansier features hundreds, if not thousands, of guillemots (Uria aalge) in flight over Hornøya, Norway. The repeating shapes have an Escher-like quality. Pansier took a silver award in the “birds in flight” category of the prize.

Luca Eberle from Italy photographed the – unfortunately killed, stuffed and discarded – Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) shown below in Malta. Authorities inspect taxidermy samples to catch illegal hunting of protected species like this one, causing some collectors to dispose of older specimens. Here, a BirdLife Malta officer is shown finding the stuffed vulture, which had been left by the roadside. Eberle won a bronze award in the “conservation, single image” category for this shot.

Another underwater shot, from Romain Barats, features gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) feeding in Charcot Bay, Antarctica, below. Barats was snorkelling when a raft of gentoo penguins appeared to fish and feed on krill. “These iconic birds are incredibly curious so they went straight to me to evaluate if I could be a threat or not. They spent a while swimming so fast around me,” he said in an announcement about the competition, in which he won a bronze award in the “birds in the environment” category.

We cannot live without soil. It provides us with building materials, most of our antibiotics and 95 per cent of our food.

In, photographer and soil ecologist Frank Ashwood urges us to better appreciate and protect the soil we rely on. He does so with stunning images of the creatures that call soil home.

The adorable velvet worm in the main image was found under a log in a misty beech forest on the South Island of New Zealand. “They look like little worms rolled in sequins,” says Ashwood. But looks can be deceiving: “They crawl around and shoot glue out of special organs on their heads to immobilise their pray, which they’ll then go and eat while alive.”

A droplet of sperm deposited by a male springtail, a tiny insect-like creature, sits atop a delicate stem made of protein-rich secretions in the image below. “It’s like a lollipop, basically, with a bit of sperm-rich fluid on the top, which the males leave for the females to come and find,” says Ashwood.

But beware any marauding rivals. “If a male finds another springtail’s spermatophore, they will actually eat it to destroy it,” he says.

Below, a beautiful woodlouse spider stares straight down the lens of Ashwood’s camera. Its large fangs have evolved to better hunt woodlice. “They’ll come at a woodlouse from the top or the side, grasp it, then reach underneath with those sharp bits of the fangs and pierce into the soft underbelly,” he says.

A bright yellow slime mould stretches across a decaying log in the shot below. “It’s a big, sprawling mass of a single cell, essentially; they branch out looking for food,” says Ashwood. The mould’s efficient networks have been used to map road networks, the fastest way out of an IKEA showroom and dark matter throughout the universe, he says.

This gorgeous giant springtail, below, was found in a forest in New Zealand. Its orange spines help it camouflage against logs. “Because they’re rare, when you do see one, it’s a moment of pure exhilaration,” says Ashwood. “They’re an indicator of the forest being in really good condition.”

Ashwood, who is based at Lincoln University in New Zealand, snapped the silvery springtail below while in the UK. During the Victorian period in the 1800s, their iridescent scales were used to test microscopes. “They’ve got really ornate, tiny sculpturing on them, so the better detail you could see, the better your microscope,” he says.

Ashwood hopes his book will encourage people to protect soil, for instance by reducing deforestation and farming more sustainably. “Over half of the world’s biodiversity is in soil, and we’re losing it at a rate that is not sustainable,” he says.

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From a viper with a bloodthirsty hitchhiker to a bullfrog narrowly missing its lunch, these photographs, all of which are in the running for this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, offer a glimpse into the drama unfolding across the animal kingdom.

Biting Back,Ěýan intimidating shot captured by Andrea and Maceo Grammatico,Ěýwas highly commended in the contest’s Animal Portraits category. The twins say it wasn’t until reviewing their photographs that they spotted a mosquito drinking from the head of the fer-de-lance – the most dangerous snake in Central America.

There was a near miss in Jens Cullmann’s Split-Second Escape, highly commended in the Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles category and shown in the main image. The moment was almost as fleeting as the frog’s prey – an African babul blue butterfly – and all the more remarkable given that Cullmann had spotted tadpoles a month earlier, returning to find them transformed into young bullfrogs. African bullfrogs spend much of the year underground in an inactive state known as aestivation,Ěýemerging only for a short period after the rainy season to breed,Ěýhunt and gorge. 

Hiding not hunting is the speciality of the lichen dragon katydid captured by Gil Wizen,Ěýbelow. Named Hidden Dragon, Wizen’s shot, highly commended in the Behaviour: Invertebrates category, captures the almost perfectly camouflaged, 15-millimetre-long, spiky insect – a rare species found only in the Ecuadorian Andes mountains.

Moving away from rural environments,Ěý±Ę´Ç´Ç±ôłŮľ±łľ±đĚý±Ę˛ą˛őłŮľ±łľ±đĚýby Loren Elliott,Ěýbelow, was highly commended in the Urban Wildlife category. Elliott captures the unusual sight of a black bear taking time to chill in a swimming pool in southern California. While the bear may look somewhat out of place,Ěýthese run-ins are becoming surprisingly common as housing developments continue to encroach on bear territory.  

Finally,Ěýa black vulture grasps the carcass of a yacare caiman in Andrew Parkinson’s Wings of Darkness,Ěýbelow, captured in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands and also highly commended in the Animal Portraits category. Despite a seemingly firm grip, the scavenger’s meal wasn’t to be,Ěýwith a jaguar waiting just out of shot for the perfect opportunity to claim the caiman.

The competition’s overall winner will be announced on 13 October. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest is organised by London’s Natural History Museum,Ěýwhich will run an of the images from 16 October to 11 July 2027.

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.