CNN
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Biologists tracking whales in Norwegian fjords, scientists holding a vast telescope painted under the breathtaking sky, and tiny caraglets in the top image of this year’s natural scientists’ workplace competition.
Six winners were selected from over 200 entries submitted to the competition. It presents the diverse, engaging and challenging jobs that scientists perform around the world. In its sixth year, the contest will be judged by a ju apprentice made up of staff from the journal Nature, which hosts the competition.
The overall victory image was photographed by Emma Vogel, a doctoral student at the University of Tromso. Biologist Ordon Riccarden, who scans water around a fishing trawler in northern Norway, is scanning the water for whales while holding an air gun.
“You can smell their breath,” Vogel said of the whales in a competition press release Tuesday. “And you could hear them before you could see them, it’s always very incredible.”
The winning image shows scientists in cold and warm climates. One is characterized by researchers who bore ice cores in the Svalbad archipelago, while another shows a biologist holding a small carloglet in the Lassen National Forest in California.
Scientists depicted another image next to a foggy weather balloon on Mount Hermos in Greece, another shows the vast Antarctic telescope at Amundsen Scott South Paul station illuminated by overhangs of the aurora.
The final victory photo shows the silhouette of a man entering the cabin against a dark background of the starry sky in eastern Siberia. His colleague, photographer Jiayi Wang, said the remote area they worked was beautiful and the long period they spent there could be boring too. “There’s no network there, and the only thing you can do is look at the rocks,” he said in a press release.