Unstructured Extremes

When I was a kid, I would spend hours thumbing through the Guinness Book of World Records. There was something mesmerizing about contemplating those things that were at the utter extreme of a bell curve. I was particularly interested in the parts that pertained to the natural world: the deepest canyon, the coldest recorded temperature, the biggest star, and so forth and so on.

Here is a pictorial compilation of some of those most extreme things including entries for the greatest vertical drop, the smallest island, and the largest impact crater on the planet.