The Antarctic Unit offers history, environmental data, information about scientific missions, and tourism opportunities

Amazon (Photograph by James P. Blair)

About 200 Surui Indians live in this village in the Amazon rain forest.
The Amazon is the world’s greatest wilderness, greatest forest, and largest repository of biodiversity. When I walk into the forest I feel at home, enveloped by nature. It is wilderness for the sophisticate, where the wonders are tiny and intricate, and where nature paints with more shades of green than one would think possible.—Thomas Lovejoy, biodiversity advisor for the World Bank

Canadian Rockies (Photograph by George F. Mobley)

If you rent a car in Banff, make sure you get one with an extra large windshield, because as you drive the park roads, the view of the Canadian Rockies is so grand and all-encompassing, you’ll get a stiff neck trying to take it all in!—photographer Raymond Gehman

Galápagos (Photograph by Robert W. Madden)

... An isolated, ecologically rich preserve, protected from human distortion and therefore revealing nature in her pristine propriaty. —Stephen Jay Gould

The most exquisite place I’ve ever been is the Havasupai Indian Reservation in the heart of the Grand Canyon. Hike or raft there, stay in a cottage or pitch a tent, swim through the five waterfalls, and watch horses sip the water with their foals.—Darryl Hannah, actress

Anybody who was born to this landscape always has a hunger for it, and tends to feel a bit crowded anywhere else. The outback is where you’re alone with the wind, earth, and sky.—Jill Ker Conway, historian

A spine-cheek anemone fish swims over a field of purple-tipped anemone tentacles.
Photograph by David Doubilet

My most emotional dive took place about ten years ago in Papua New Guinea. After a lifetime of diving with my father, Jacques, and learning about the underwater realms he knew so well...I had the chance to show him a place he had never seen and to share my pleasure in the diversity of corals and fish that live there.—Jean-Michel Cousteau

Arabian travelers and their camels trek across the hot desert sands near Al Souf, Algeria.
Photograph by Thomas J. Abercrombie

The Sahara’s most beautiful portion is the Ténéré desert of Niger, an endless-seeming field of dunes the size of Germany. Here courtly Tuareg tribesmen size you up like the rakish pirates of this sand sea they are.—Donovan Webster, writer and Sahara veteran

Serengeti

Few places that I know have the same impact; for me, this area within its vastness represents the most special destination. I reach for words: spectacular, thrilling, awesome, beautiful, extraordinary.—Richard Leakey

A hell of a place to land a plane. —Jimmy Angel, the American aviator who accidentally discovered Angel Falls in Venezuela’s tepui country