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Pictures of the year

165 photographers in the field

2MILLION+ photos submitted

Here’s a selection of their best work

A large lion’s mane jellyfish with bright pink folds bunched together in the center; a widespread circular disk body that is both transparent and opaque with brown ribbed gills.

White Sea, Russia

Marine biologist Alexander Semenov calls the lion’s mane jellyfish the queen of the Arctic seas. He photographed this regal specimen in its final stage of life: Having reproduced, it has shrunk in size, digested or shed its hundreds of long tentacles, and become, in Semenov’s words, an “alien flower.”

Photograph by Alexander Semenov

A Caucasian woman wearing a tight black head wrap standing in a partially deconstructed space suit with a large back structure that contains lights and wires. The suit is pale white, and the astronaut is wearing gloves and is suspended in a machine connected to the structure around her waist.

Coconino County, Arizona

Before the Artemis program sends humans to the lunar surface, NASA performs high-fidelity tests on Earth. For a mock moonwalk, astronaut Zena Cardman wore this training suit weighing more than 80 pounds to simulate a real suit’s range of motion and weight in lunar gravity.

Photograph by Dan Winters

A low-to-the-ground scene showing six men wearing white and green camouflage winter gear as they lie down forward with their feet strapped to skis and poles under their arms as they ski across the snow and under a maze of practice wires during a military exercise.

Sodankylä, Finland

At a military facility north of the Arctic Circle, Finnish and U.S. soldiers train for winter warfare by navigating an obstacle course while on skis. The exercise took place two months before Finland—which shares an 800-mile border with Russia—joined NATO. The training was arranged in response to the war in Ukraine.

Photograph by Louie Palu

An older woman stands in the middle of a circle of people sitting in chairs outside a large raised mobile porch with a wooden canopy and green polka dot curtains. The woman is wearing a brightly colored orange, yellow, and red floral dress with ruffles on the shoulders and bottom. The dress is floor length, and the woman is striking a flamenco pose with one arm out in front bent halfway and the other arm relaxed and above her head. There are four people around her. Three women wear similar dresses in varying colors, and a man plays an acoustic guitar while wearing leather pants and a large green cowboy hat.

Doñana National Park, Spain

Pilgrims sing, dance, and play flamenco during a stop along their spring journey to the Virgin of Rocío shrine. Photographer Aitor Lara says that the group’s lyrics “reflect the magical experience of the pilgrimage and the joy of being able to present their fervor to the Virgin.”

Photograph by Aitor Lara

Four fully grown hyenas with light brown fur and dark brown spots that are standing a few feet away from one another in a curved line moving away from the viewer on a dirt landscape.

Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya

Soon after dawn at Lemek Conservancy, spotted hyenas arrive at a pond to drink. Widely misunderstood, hyenas are fierce, intelligent, and social, living and hunting as members of matriarchal clans. Jen Guyton captured this close-up with an armored, remote-controlled robot designed by National Geographic photo engineers.

Photograph by Jen Guyton

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH Jen Guyton

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Video by Jen Guyton, Bobby Neptune, Matt Norman

A young Asian couple look at their smartphone, which is extended on a selfie stick while a crowd in the background stands near a large brown and gold statue almost 20 feet tall.

Xi’an, China

On Chinese Labor Day, tourists pose for a selfie in front of a pagoda and bronze statue of Xuanzang, the seventh-century Buddhist monk who spent 16 years on a pilgrimage to India and translated dozens of manuscripts from Sanskrit into Chinese.

Photograph by John Stanmeyer

Two middle-age men swing sledgehammers while destroying the ceramic container around a four-foot-tall and four-foot-wide solid piece of glass melted into the large container. The men are wearing blue uniforms and are standing in the middle of a concrete floor.

Chiba, Japan

Workers at the Chiba Kogaku glass factory use sledgehammers to remove the clay pot around a core of optical glass. Highly resistant to air-temperature changes, the glass will be cut into slabs, shipped to the University of Arizona, then melted and cast into mirrors for large, high-altitude telescopes.

Photograph by Christopher Payne

A view looking down from above but still inside a cave system where a person in an orange jumpsuit rappels in the far edge of the scene and two other people wearing scuba diving equipment swim in the dark green waters at the bottom of the cave with their headlamps illuminating their figures. The walls of the cave look jagged and sharp and are mostly light brown and black.

Frasassi Caves, Italy

Caver Valentina Mariani (above), National Geographic Explorer Kenny Broad (center), and Nadir Quarta prepare for a dive into the dark, toxic waters of Lago Verde. Such sunlight-starved ecosystems could offer a glimpse into the chemistry of life in alien seas.

Photograph by Carsten Peter

A vast, snow-covered landscape of rolling hills with thousands of brown and white caribou, four-legged animals larger than a human with spiky antlers and long noses, moving as a huge grouping in orderly fashion across the scene.

Northwest Territories, Canada

Inuvialuit herders move Canada’s last free-range herd of reindeer, numbering around 4,000, to the animals’ calving grounds. The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation took full ownership of the herd in 2021 with a goal of growing a sustainable food source.

Photograph by Katie Orlinsky

Seven women with olive skin in long, patterned dresses and a variety of headscarves are seen kneeling in a semicircle on multiple blankets. There is a large and brightly colored tapestry on the wall behind them with geometric patterns. The women are removing a thin white cloth about seven feet long from a large collection of circular breads and other food.

Jarqorgon, Uzbekistan

An all-woman ceremony beneath a hand-embroidered suzani marks a son’s departure to study in the capital, Tashkent. While one recites Quranic verses, others remove a covering to bless the flatbread. This ritual was influenced by Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest living religions.

Photograph by Matthieu Paley

A seven-foot-long marine fish known as a zebra shark swimming across the view from left to right in dark blue water where the surrounding borders of the aquarium, as well as other fish, are visible. The zebra shark has grayish brown skin and is covered from head to tail in black spots of varying sizes every few inches. The shark also has a long, sweeping tail that curves upward.

Chicago, Illinois

A seven-foot-long zebra shark glides through an exhibit at Shedd Aquarium, one of several aquariums where endangered zebra sharks are breeding to produce eggs for shipment to Indonesia. They will be raised and released into a marine protected area in Raja Ampat to rebuild its wild population.

Photograph by David Doubilet

A desert scene at dusk with rich brown dirt and two trucks, seven people, and three stand-up construction lights that illuminate the scene of people excavating a few feet of dirt surrounding a buried fossil at least 30 feet in length and five feet wide.

Ténéré Region, Niger

In the Sahara, a team of paleontologists led by Explorer Paul Sereno excavates a sauropod skeleton. After shipment to the University of Chicago, the expedition’s finds will be cleaned, studied, and later returned to Niger.

Photograph by Keith Ladzinski

Two women with brown skin, one slightly darker than the other, stand side by side with one arm wrapped behind the other person in a dirt field with two large trees in the background and a dark gray sky. The women are wearing matching red-and-orange striped dresses with white sleeves and matching red headscarves and black sandals. Two women with brown skin both wearing fabric wrappings around their heads, one black and containing more fabric and the other a checkered white-and-blue pattern. Both women wear plaid button-up flannel shirts, one black and red and the other green and blue. The women stand side by side with green trees in the background, and the woman with a black headscarf and black shirt holds an orange and white basketball.

Hargeisa, Somaliland

Photographer Diana Markosian traveled to Somaliland—an unrecognized, self-declared state within Somalia—three decades after the country emerged from civil war. She found plenty of youthful energy: “I met a generation of girls who are mixing things up and reshaping culture while also maintaining tradition.” Left: Suhuur Hassan, 19, and Muhim Mawliid, 20 (looking at camera), study traditional dance at Hargeisa’s Halkar Academy. Right: Hafsa Omar, 20, and her sister Asma, 18 (holding ball), play on a women’s basketball team and attend university. Hafsa also works digitizing cassette tapes and other media containing music, speeches, and more.

Photographs by Diana Markosian

A large sloping hillside in a rolling landscape is covered in small bushes and a few tall, skinny trees. Eight gray elephants are seen scattered throughout the hillside among the trails in the bushes. A river valley is seen below, and the sky is gray with clouds.

Valparai, India

Elephants wander a tea estate that was once part of their forest habitat before being converted to crop production in the late 1800s. Today about 70,000 people live and work in the region among 120 elephants.

Photograph by Brent Stirton

A large metal rectangle lying on its side with two glass windows sits in a laboratory, and two scientists kneel on the floor inside while wearing white plastic bodysuits and blue hair nets. A brown bat with its wings outstretched is seen flying in front of one scientist’s body within this large but enclosed space.

Providence, Rhode Island

At Brown University, doctoral student Brooke Quinn (blue glove) and her adviser, Sharon Swartz, work with a Seba’s short-tailed bat inside a wind tunnel. They are testing how tiny sensory hairs on bats’ wings affect their flight responses to turbulence.

Photograph by Nichole Sobecki

A kiwi, a small wingless bird about the size of a rugby ball with large three-toed feet and a long slender beak, is asleep in the arms of a man kneeling in long grass. The man is wearing a black shirt and camouflage shorts and has traditional Maori tattoos on his upper thighs. Tracking equipment is seen off to the side, and a third hand is helping hold the bird from outside the view.

Wellington, New Zealand

Field specialists examine a North Island brown kiwi two months after 11 of the birds were released outside New Zealand’s capital. A national symbol, kiwis have been decimated by predators, especially stoats, introduced in the 1800s.

Photograph by Robin Hammond

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH Robin Hammond

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Video by Robin Hammond

A desert scene at dusk where an animal pen created from wooden posts made from tree branches and wire holds a large number of goats. A man with dark skin, black hair, and a white and black beard is standing in the middle of the animals with a cream-colored cloth wrap around his shoulders and torso. The man is holding in his arms a small goat that is black and white. Stars are visible in the sky behind the scene.

Chacha, India

Taj Mohammad stands among his sheep and goats in the desert landscape of Rajasthan. As a boy in 1998, Mohammad felt the ground shake and witnessed a gigantic dust cloud when India conducted underground nuclear tests at the nearby Pokhran site. India is currently one of nine countries with nuclear weapons.

Photograph by Chinky Shukla

Three medical bags and a glass jar are prominent in the frame. One bag contains blue fluid and is relatively full, the second bag contains blood, and the third bag contains clear liquid. The glass jar is about the size of a can of soda and is held up by two hands, one above and one below, wearing white gloves. In the jar suspended in clear fluid is a small pig’s brain, filling the jar about 75 percent. In the background a laboratory can be seen with a few computer monitors displaying data.

New Haven, Connecticut

To better study how cells from one region of the brain connect with cells in others, Yale researchers looked for a way to reanimate recently dead brain tissue. The team succeeded with a pig’s brain by combining a custom drug cocktail (blue) with an oxygen carrier (dark red).

Photograph by Max Aguilera-Hellweg

A man wearing a head-to-toe white plastic suit and white gloves is seen kneeling on a metallic plate on the floor in front of a large, square machine. The machine is open with one panel to the side, and thousands of wires of varying size, length, and color are visible within. The scene takes place in a large room with white walls, floors, and ceiling where large machines dangle from the ceiling and no other people are visible.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California

A technician studies the “brains” of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will launch next year. As it flies by Europa—one of the largest of Jupiter’s moons—the craft will study its ice shell and characterize the salty sea below.

Photograph by Chris Gunn

An outdoor scene deep in an old-growth forest. The view consists of dozens of tall and slender trees crossing the frame vertically. The branches of the trees are covered in a texture of brown, gold, and black, and the branches are drooping downward due to their weight. The entire scene is full of monarchs, orange-and-black butterflies about three inches across. They crowd together on the tree branches, weighing them down and completely covering the tree trunks as well. Golden sunlight shines through the scene from left to right.

Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico

Streaked with sunlight and crowded together for warmth in winter, monarch butterflies blanket fir trees in El Rosario Sanctuary. Photographer Jaime Rojo received special permits to work outside the sanctuary’s operating hours. He made this photograph shortly before sunset.

Photograph by Jaime Rojo

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH Jaime Rojo

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Video by Jaime Rojo, Luis Antonio Rojas, Ganesh Marin

A banded sea krait is an evenly striped black-and-white snake with alternating colors. It is very long and slender and is seen here swimming deep underwater in the ocean. The head of the snake is far away, and the back of the snake covers part of the front of the frame. The snake is swimming upward toward the surface where the sun is shining through, and multiple fish silhouettes are seen in the distance.

Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, Palau

A banded sea krait swims toward the ocean’s surface for a breath of air. In 2015 the Pacific island nation created a marine sanctuary protecting 193,000 square miles of its ocean waters.

Photograph by Kiliii Yüyan

Three people are spaced along a cramped coastline. Massive circular gray boulders with relatively smooth surfaces fill the scene as waves from the ocean crash to the right of the frame on the rocks. The three people are walking in the low areas of the rocks, all three wearing white, loose-fitting clothes with simple black stripes. The people have dark skin and black hair. Two of them are wearing hats; the one in the middle is not. The person on the right is kneeling, appearing to inspect something on a boulder.

Tayrona National Park, Colombia

Mamo Francisco Chaparro, a spiritual authority of the Indigenous Arhuaco people, collects barnacles on the Caribbean coast. Dugunawin Garawitu (left) and Jayson Izquierdo are training to become mamos. Chaparro will imbue the barnacles with thoughts and gratitude before depositing them at other Arhuaco sacred sites.

Photograph by Stephen Ferry

A taxidermied bird stands on a small pedestal with models of three large white eggs at its feet. The bird is squat with long legs and large toes. The body of the bird is wide with ruffled gray and white feathers, and it has a long and slender neck. The bird has small eyes and a short, narrow, sharp beak protruding from its small round head. The animal stands on a table with a red tablecloth, and behind it are two blue walls. On one wall hangs a painting of a white bald man with a brown beard in a blue robe. The other wall holds an inset cabinet with an array of wooden figurines.

Punta Arenas, Chile

A Darwin’s rhea, named for naturalist Charles Darwin, is displayed at the Maggiorino Borgatello museum. Darwin encountered the species of flightless bird in 1834 during a tour of Patagonia. Comparing it with the larger American rhea helped him realize that two species can arise from a common ancestor.

Photograph by Marcio Pimenta

A dark-skinned woman wearing a colorful tan dress and red head wrap kneels waist-deep in a narrow river in a vibrant green landscape. Behind the woman are two dark-skinned men and another to the side standing above the water. The men behind are holding the woman’s arms and gesturing for her to dip her head into the water. On the riverbank behind them are several people, including women in dresses and varying head wraps, all watching the event.

Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Pastor Ngoy Niko (right) of the African Apostolic Church of Congo presides over the baptism of a new member in the Lualaba River. The congregants use this stream for initiation and purification rituals because they believe it is one of the few still clean amid local mining for cobalt.

Photograph by Davide Monteleone

An underwater scene in deep blue water. The seafloor is seen to the left of the frame, and a tan-skinned man in a blue swim shirt and goggles is surrounded by bubbles of air from jumping into the water. The bubbles obscure his features and much of the scene. In the man's hand is a long wooden stick with black rubber straps and a metal spear hanging off the end.

Helen Reef, Palau

Brian Fidiiy jumps from a boat into the Helen Reef lagoon to fish for food with a homemade speargun. Fidiiy and fellow Helen Reef rangers—all members of the local Indigenous population—protect Palau’s most biologically diverse reef from illegal commercial fishing.

Photograph by Kiliii Yüyan

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH Kiliii Yüyan

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Video by Shin Sirachai Arunrugstichai

A large indoor scene full of purple and green light showing a crowded dance floor. Many adult women with dark skin and hair are seen dancing and embracing one another. Multiple people are holding beverages in their hands, and many have their hands in the air and are smiling. Neon lights can be seen in the background.

Lagos, Nigeria

Ashley Okoli dances at a Lagos nightclub, which offers a rare welcoming space for people of all sexual orientations. Same-sex relationships are illegal in Nigeria, yet in the past four years LGBTQ activists have celebrated Pride month with performances and protests in some parts of the country.

Photograph by Yagazie Emezi

A geometric diamond is standing on its fine-tipped corner in a dark setting. This close-up view of the diamond shows its sparkle with glinting light and rainbow-colored reflections. A single white light source provides a circular illuminated background for the diamond.

New York, New York

Climate-tech start-up Aether transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air into lab-grown diamonds such as this two-carat princess cut. Aether’s process uses clean energy sources, and the company pledges to remove an extra 20 metric tons of CO2 for every carat of diamond it creates—more CO2 than the average American produces in a year.

Photograph by Davide Monteleone

Two men, one in green medical scrubs and another in clothes for working outdoors, carry an unconscious white alpaca about six feet long upside down by its feet through a poorly illuminated wooden room with a large white metal tool on the foreground. Two other people in green medical scrubs stand off to the side and are wearing face masks.

Puno, Peru

A medical team prepares a female alpaca for surgery to retrieve eggs for in vitro fertilization. The procedure is part of a program to breed alpacas that are more resilient to climate change and yield high-quality wool for farmers.

Photograph by Alessandro Cinque

A woman stands with arms spread while snow falls around her at night. This Caucasian woman is wearing layers of clothing, most prominently a floor-length white robe and also a full-torso covering made from gray animal skin that fits over her head. She is wearing a fur-lined hat as well. In this snowy landscape a tall wooden lookout hut stands behind the woman and is illuminated by a small fire on the ground.

Ny-Ålesund, Norway

The Reverend Siv Limstrand of the Church of Norway 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 is chronicling, and coping with, climate change.

Photograph by Esther Horvath

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH Esther Horvath

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Video by Esther Horvath, Joanne Sulich, KT Miller, Marie Koch, René Munder

Five Indigenous people wearing handmade costumes that are pink and resemble the features of Amazonian pink river dolphins. They are wearing masks that cover their heads and faces and have long snouts with rows of white teeth to mimic the animal.

Puerto Nariño, Colombia

In the cosmology of the Tikuna, one of the largest Indigenous groups in the Amazon, pink dolphins are mischievous spirits and guardians of the watery realm. Women dance in dolphin costumes made from the bark of the yanchama tree.

Photograph by Thomas Peschak

PESCHAK’S TWO-YEAR EXPEDITION ACROSS THE AMAZON IS SUPPORTED BY ROLEX’S PERPETUAL PLANET INITIATIVE, A PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY.

A sailboat viewed from on board looking forward standing approximately along the midline of the boat. In the view is a person gripping the rails along the edge of the boat as the nose of the boat dips into the ocean and crisp blue waves of water splash at twice the person’s height. The boat is mainly white and gray, and two sails are raised on the single mast, a smaller one forward and a larger one backward.

South Atlantic Ocean

Volcanologists and mountaineers return after a weeks-long expedition to Mount Michael, a remote volcano in the South Sandwich Islands. The team made a successful first ascent and study of the peak, which holds one of Earth’s few lava lakes.

Photograph by Renan Ozturk

These images appear in the December 2023 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Design: Hannah Tak

Development: Ryan Morris and Ben Scott

Photo editor: Sadie Quarrier

Video production: Cosima Amelang

Text editor: Glenn Oeland

Research editor: Heidi Schultz

Copy editor: Cindy Leitner