This book celebrates the patterns and abstract forms found in nature. Bernhard Edmaier’s amazing aerial photographs show the beautiful shapes formed on the earth’s surface by rocks, ice, sand, water, trees and plants. The hundreds of images in this Handbook to the Patterns of the Earth make us look at the world in a new way, by showing us surprising similarities and unexpected links between the most disparate regions of the planet. Instead of seeing a forest or a desert or a field, we see circles and lines, zigzags and spirals, abstract shapes and precise repetition occurring in the most unexpected places.

In this book, Edmaier's photographs are organized by shape and form into clearly defined sections, with tabbed pages for easy access. Each section features short texts explaining where the types of patterns depicted in that chapter are found and how they are formed. In additon, every picture has a caption describing the location of the depicted pattern, and how it was created.