There is no consensus on why this particular lake is pink, but some hypotheses include the presence of dye produced by bacteria in the water, or colonies of red bacteria living in the lake’s salt crusts. Fun fact: the water stays pink even when you take it away in a bottle, so it’s not just a trick of the light.

The colors in this hot spring have been more thoroughly researched than the distinctive pink hue of Lake Hillier and are definitely due to bacterial colonies lining its walls. Sometimes, after heavy seismic activity in the area, the pool will erupt as a geyser.

The Havasu creek plummets 100 feet over a vertical cliff in the Grand Canyon, landing in a pool rich in calcium carbonate (which gives it that vivid blue-green color). Because the mineral content of the creek is so high, the configuration of the waterfall is always changing (as the cliff top builds up and breaks off).

An accidental man-made phenomenon, Fly Geyser is the byproduct of well drilling in the 1960s–a poorly capped well began spewing dissolved minerals, and over the years those minerals have piled up to form the geyser’s distinctive rainbow pillars. Sadly, it’s on private property.

More popularly known as the “Rainbow Mountains of China,” the Zhangye Danxia landforms cover an area of almost 300 square miles, and are formed from geological processes unique to China. This landform was declared a World Heritage Site in 2010.

Powerful geothermal activity in the area has created an array of hot springs and mud pools in and around Rotorua, New Zealand. The downside of all of that geothermal activity is that it causes heavy hydrogen sulfide emissions, which smell like rotten eggs and have earned the city the nickname “Sulfur City.”

Rio Tinto, Spain A river in southwestern Spain, the Rio Tinto flows from the Sierra Morena mountains south down to the Gulf of Cadiz. It gets its red color from dissolved iron deposits due to the river’s high acidity (pH 2), a possible byproduct of the heavy mining of precious metals in the area, from as early as 3,000 BC.

Located in the Liaohe River Delta, this beach is home to a massive population of seaweed, which flourishes in the saline-alkali soil. Though the seaweed is green for most of the year, it undergoes its startling transformation to red in the autumn.

These 4,086 square miles in southwest Bolivia make up the world’s largest salt flat. The vast and incredibly flat plains and clear skies of Salar de Uyuni make it both one of the most famous “natural mirrors” on the planet, as well as an ideal altimeter calibration site for Earth observation satellites.

In the Danakil Depression (a crater from a volcanic explosion) this alien landscape was formed by Miocene salt deposits and hydrothermal activity. The constant geothermal activity forces geysers and hot springs up from below the Earth’s surface, which leak brine and acidic liquids. “Dallol” or “dissolution” refers to the green acid ponds (pH <1), sulfur, and iron oxide deposits, and comes from the Afar people native to the Horn of Africa.

Located northwest of Osoyoos, BC, the Kliluk Spotted Lake contains some of the highest concentrations of magnesium sulfate, calcium, and sodium sulfates) in the world. When the water of the lake evaporates in the summer, it leaves pockets (the “spots’) of different colored ponds based on the individual mineral concentrations.

This orange part on the rocks is lichen.

A lichen consists of a simple photosynthesizing organism. Generally, most of a lichen's bulk is made of interwoven fungal filaments, although in filamentous and gelatinous lichens this is not the case. The fungus is called a mycobiont.