Jan. 14, 2012. The Italian cruise ship 'Costa Concordia' ran aground and keeled over off the Italian coast near the island of Giglio in Tuscany, Italy.Eric Vandeville—ABACAPRESS.com
In the fall of 2012, the Mars Curiosity Rover—after years of travel—finally reached its destination, touching down on the Red Planet and transmitting back to Earth a series of strange landscapes of the planet’s surface. Here on Earth, the scenery sometimes resembled the barren Martian terrain, as wildfires, droughts and natural disasters shaped the landscapes of Earth. Climate change, too, had a say on Earth’s canvas—bringing a cold snap to Europe, a dusting of snow to the Middle East and a super-powered hurricane to the East Coast of the United States.
But as much as natural phenomena shaped Earth’s landscapes, humans forced their intentions upon Earth as well. Wars in the DRC and Syria reduced entire city structures to rubble. Careless chemical spills dyed our waters strange and unnatural colors, and continued deforestation in Brazil’s rainforests left huge swathes arid and bare. And finally, large-scale accidents remind us of man’s hubris, like the Costa Concordia in Italy— it’s abandoned carcass standing as a monument to man’s recklessness.
Here, TIME looks back on the byproducts of man’s folly and nature’s fury in a gallery of the year’s strange and surreal landscapes.
Jan. 14, 2012. The Italian cruise ship 'Costa Concordia' ran aground and keeled over off the Italian coast near the island of Giglio in Tuscany, Italy.Eric Vandeville—ABACAPRESS.comFeb. 11, 2012. Fishermen break the ice to save the fish at the frozen Dojran lake, Macedonia.Ognen Teofilovski—ReutersFeb. 1, 2012. The 70-year-old Sunken cemetery is seen after Lake Jablanicko dried up near Jablanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina.Dado Ruvic—ReutersMarch 6, 2012. A house is surrounded by spiderwebs next to flood waters in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Daniel Munoz—ReutersAug. 6, 2012. Thousands of fish are seen floating dead in Nigeen Lake in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir.Farooq Khan—EPAMay 31, 2012. An aerial view shows a clandestine airstrip used for drug smuggling after it was destroyed in a military operation approximately 35 km (22 miles) from the border with Colombia, in the state of Apure, Venezuela.Carlos Garcia Rawlins—ReutersAug. 31, 2012. A general view of some of the 200 pieces of World War I ammunition which emerged from a melting glacier on a Trentino mountain peak. Each weighing between 7-10 kilos, the 85-100 mm caliber explosive devices were found at an altitude of 3,200 meters, when a once-perennial glacier on the Ago de Nardis peak partially melted due to a recent heat wave that reached into Italy's highest peaks.Maffei Glauco/Trentino Italian Finance Police/Handout/EPAJune 12, 2012. An Indian firefighter attempts to extinguish flames at the Khanna Paper Mill in the outskirts of Amritsar.Narinder Nanu—AFP/Getty ImagesMarch 5, 2012. Smoke rises from the debris as a fire burns in a military barracks, near an underground munitions depot, in Brazzaville, Congo.Elie Mbena—APMarch 6, 2012. A fishing boat, dragged in-land during last year's tsunami, sits on the ground in Kesennuma, Japan.Daniel Berehulak—Getty ImagesAug. 1, 2012. The carcass of a male sub-adult humpback whale washes up at New Port Beach overnight in Sydney, Australia.Brendon Thorne—Getty ImagesSept. 11, 2012. Toxic foam forms as trash accumulates against a floodgate along the Sarapui river in Nilopolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Victor R. Caivano—APJan. 17, 2012. National Trust ranger Kate Martin plants recycled Christmas trees in the sand dunes of Formby Point in Formby, England. British DIY store Homebase has given over 5000 recycled Christmas trees to the National Trust at it's Formby Point nature reserve to help the battle against the erosion of the internationally important sand dunes. Christopher Furlong—Getty ImagesAug. 21, 2012. Embers from a wildfire glow on the ground in Tabuyo del Monte, near Leon, Spain.Cesar Manso—AFP/Getty ImagesMarch 4, 2012. The Perito Moreno glacier is seen after the rupture of a massive ice wall near the city of El Calafate in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, southern Argentina.Andres Arce—ReutersFeb. 18, 2012. Debris is seen after a fire in a market in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.Roberto Escobar—EPAJune 5, 2012. The Rio Sucio or "Dirty River", where one branch is colored yellow/brown by the minerals it carries from the Irazu Volcano, is seen mixing with the clear waters filtered by the tropical rainforest in the Braullio Carrillo National Park, Costa Rica.Juan Carlos Ulate—ReutersFeb. 24, 2012. One green tree left in hills of burnt brown and deforested land, near Mae Chaem, northern Thailand.Barbara Walton—EPAAug. 23, 2012. This image is from a test series used to characterize the 100-millimeter Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSJune 10, 2012. The sky turns a brilliant orange as smoke from the High Park Fire fills the sky near Laporte, Colo.Marc Piscotty—ReutersJuly 16, 2012. Four rows of corn left for insurance adjusters to examine are all that remain of a 40-acre cornfield in Geff, Ill.Robert Ray—APFeb. 3, 2012. Floodwater inundates cotton crops around the northern New South Wales town of Moree, Australia. Wolter Peeters—EPAJune 2, 2012. A helicopter crosses dry creek beds as it makes an approach to a base in Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan.Tim Wimborne—ReutersApril 3, 2012. A frozen river is seen next to a group of houses located on the outskirts of the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar.David Gray—ReutersJuly 9, 2012. A white river is seen on in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. The Quxi river looks white due to more than 100 kilograms of natural latex discharged by a nearby factory and carried by water spilled from sewage pipes.ChinaFotoPress/ZUMAPRESS.comJune 29, 2012. White tents scatter the landscape as seen from this aerial photo of the Yida refugee camp along the border with North Sudan in Yida, South Sudan.Paula Bronstein—Getty ImagesFeb. 21, 2012. Clothing, lying in heaps at the site of a neighborhood destroyed by the tsunami, is piled up by clearing crew in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, northern Japan.David Guttenfelder—APNov. 2012. Strong winds and waves ripped several homes from their foundation, like this one in the Oakwood neighborhood.
Stephen Wilkes for TIMENov. 4, 2012. The rollercoaster from Seaside Heights Boardwalk sits partially submerged in the ocean after Hurricane Sandy.Stephen Wilkes for TIMEJan. 7, 2012. A development is seen on one of the islands of The World Islands project in Dubai.Jumana El Heloueh—ReutersOct. 4, 2012. Tourists visit the scenic spot of Crescent Lake in Dunhuang City, northwest China's Gansu Province. Dunhuang, a major stop on the ancient Silk road well known for its Mogao Caves (Caves of 1,000 Buddhas), Crescent Lake and Mingsha Mountain, has attracted large numbers of tourists from both home and abroad.Zhang Xiaoliang—Xinhua/LandovFeb. 2, 2012. An aerial picture shows the Mont-Saint-Michel, a tourist attraction and Unesco world heritage site in northwestern France.Kenzo Tribouillard—AFP/Getty ImagesAug. 13, 2012. Villas are seen on the top of an eight-story shopping mall in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province of China.ChinaFotoPress/ZUMAPRESS.comApril 3, 2012. Workers are seen busy with the construction work of the Supertrees in the Supertree Grove at the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.Then Chih Wey—Xinhua/CorbisNov. 4, 2012. Water is discharged at the Shirakawa-go World Heritage site in Shirakawa, Gifu, Japan. This annual drill is held to prevent fire.The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
