Winners Of The 2017 Nat Geo Nature Photographer Of The Year Contest Will Take Your Breath Away

A summer thunderstorm unleashes lightning on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

On the flanks of Kilauea Volcano, Hawai’i, the world’s only lava ocean entry spills molten rock into the Pacific Ocean. After erupting in early 2016, the lava flow took about two months to reach the sea, six miles away.

This is a leopard who walked past our vehicle in the Okavango Delta. I admired the intensity of this leopard's eyes as it moved quietly through the grass.

Blue-filtered strobe lights stimulate fluorescent pigments in the clear tentacles of a tube-dwelling anemone in Hood Canal, Washington.

A life that will fall down soon showed the final performance.

This morning we found a pack of Painted dogs verry early morning. Together with our ranger we followd them huning until they caught a warthog. When the adults left and the pups started to eat i was able to get verry close, under the guidance of our ranger. An uniek opportunity to shoot some wide-angle pictures of the most endangered predator.

Hundreds of flamingos fly.

ON a recent trip through the olympic peninsula, I noticed what looked like a strange mass floating in the water along the area we were staying. It looked like a typical pile of floating logs and debris until an hour later, it had moved right off our deck, revealing an amazing rafted group of huge sea lions.

Split shot taken in the tide pools of Shaw's Cove at Sunset

A raft of thousands of surf scoters takes flight from the water's surface in The Great Bear Sea of British Columbia, Canada.

A dreamlike inversion in the Gesäuse region of the Austrian Alps. I noticed the clouds forming like this whilst I was further down the mountain. As I knew the view would be even better from higher up, I virtually ran up the mountain to get the view I wanted before the clouds dispersed.

Little visited and mostly unknown, the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness is an amazingly scenic and colorful expanse of stratified colors and unusual eroded rocks in the high, cold desert of northwest New Mexico. I camped near one of the most striking areas in Bisti (known as the "Hatchery") and took this photograph of the landscape on a late October afternoon. A faint path through the giant egg formations takes you through an eery dreamscape, leading up to the beautifully eroded ridge in the distance.

In winter when the sea start to froze in Greenland, the ice create lot of impressive patterns. The scale is big and it is hard to imagine that this is 350m above the level of the sea.