Natural wonders of Oceania

The wonders of Oceania in the atlas so far. This region grows as the atlas expands.

Aoraki / Mount Cook

Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's highest peak — a snow-and-ice pyramid rising above glacier-fed turquoise lakes and the country's longest glacier, in the heart of the Southern Alps' greatest concentration of high mountains.

Mountain Oceania

Blue Mountains

New South Wales, Australia

A sandstone plateau slashed by vast eucalypt-filled valleys that shimmer blue with oil haze — home to towering cliffs, waterfalls, and a tree thought extinct for 90 million years.

Forest Oceania

Bora Bora

Society Islands, French Polynesia

The archetypal South Pacific paradise — a jagged volcanic peak ringed by a luminous turquoise lagoon and a protective coral reef, encircled by palm-fringed islets of white sand.

Island Oceania

Bungle Bungle Range

Purnululu, Kimberley, Western Australia

Hundreds of orange-and-black striped sandstone domes rising from the Kimberley outback — a beehive landscape unknown to the wider world until the 1980s.

Rock formation Oceania

Great Barrier Reef

Queensland coast, Australia

The largest living structure on Earth — a 2,300-kilometre system of nearly 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands off Queensland, so vast it can be seen from space, and among the most biodiverse places in the ocean.

Coral reef Oceania

Kakadu

Northern Territory, Australia

Australia's largest national park — a vast monsoonal landscape of floodplains, waterfalls, and stone country, alive with crocodiles and millions of birds, and holding some of the world's oldest rock art.

Wetland Oceania

Milford Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's most famous fjord — sheer cliffs and the pyramid of Mitre Peak rising straight from dark water, laced with waterfalls fed by some of the highest rainfall on Earth, in the heart of Fiordland.

Fjord Oceania

Mount Yasur

Tanna Island, Vanuatu

One of the world's most accessible active volcanoes — a crater that has erupted almost continuously for centuries, flinging glowing lava bombs into the night sky just metres from its rim.

Volcano Oceania

Ningaloo Reef

Coral Coast, Western Australia

One of the world's largest fringing reefs — a coral wonderland that hugs the shore of Western Australia, where you can wade off the beach to snorkel with turtles, manta rays, and the giant whale shark.

Coral reef Oceania

Palau's Rock Islands

Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, Palau, Micronesia

Hundreds of emerald mushroom-shaped limestone islands scattered across a turquoise lagoon — a marine wonderland of hidden lakes, world-class reefs, and a lake full of harmless golden jellyfish.

Marine sanctuary Oceania

Rotorua Geothermal Field

Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand

A landscape that steams, bubbles, and erupts — geysers, boiling mud pools, and mineral terraces in impossible colours, at the heart of Māori cultural life.

Hot spring Oceania

The Twelve Apostles

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia

A row of towering limestone sea stacks rising from the Southern Ocean along Victoria's Great Ocean Road — sculpted from crumbling coastal cliffs by the relentless waves, and constantly, visibly changing.

Rock formation Oceania

Tongariro National Park

Central Plateau, North Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's oldest national park — a volcanic heartland of steaming craters, brilliant emerald lakes, and lava fields, crossed by one of the world's finest day hikes, and sacred to the Māori who gifted it for protection.

Volcano Oceania

Uluru

Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

A colossal sandstone monolith rising abruptly from the flat red heart of Australia — glowing through fiery reds and oranges at sunrise and sunset, and a place of the deepest cultural significance to its Aboriginal custodians.

Rock formation Oceania