SAN FRANCISCO — A huge new mosaic of Pluto shows the cratered, wrinkled and mountainous surfaces of the dwarf planet in amazing detail.

The new image, which is comprised of many smaller photos that have been stitched together to form this one larger view, stretches over a wide swath of the dwarf planet. It was taken by the New Horizons spacecraft just before its closest Pluto flyby on July 14.

The photo's color contrast is fascinating: The bright ice of Pluto's Sputnik Planum stand out when seen alongside the extremely dark Cthulhu Regio feature near the bottom of the image. It's easy to get lost in the chasms, craters, mountains and even possible ice volcanoes that can be seen in stark relief in this mosaic.

And it likely won't be our last spectacular view of Pluto.

New Horizons will take about one year to beam back all of the information collected during its flyby of Pluto, but the data already received on Earth is re-shaping the way researchers understand Pluto and its system of moons.

“We’re much less than halfway through transmitting data about the Pluto system to Earth, but a wide variety of new scientific results are already emerging," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said in a statement.

Chasms and craters on Pluto.

Scientists discussed Pluto's unexpected geology during sessions here at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting Thursday, and they are still trying to piece together the clues about the world's complex geological history.

New Horizons has already found unexpected evidence of glaciers flowing in Pluto's heart-shaped feature, and it's even possible that the surface of the small world is still being re-shaped by geological processes today that wipe away impact craters that would have built up on the surface over millions of years.

It's also possible that Pluto harbors ice volcanoes that formed through eruptions of ice from below the world's surface.

One of those possible ice volcanoes can be seen in the new mosaic released Thursday.

Called Wright Mons, the possible volcano can be seen at the bottom of the full mosaic.

Wright Mons (arrow), a possible ice volcano on Pluto.

"We have this crazy thing called Wright Mons. We don't know how it formed, but it's a massive edifice. It's 150 kilometers wide, it's three-to-five kilometers high. Its central depression is 5 kilometers deep," New Horizons scientist Bill McKinnon said during a presentation here Thursday.

The New Horizons team is still trying to piece together exactly what Wright Mons could be.

It took New Horizons nine years to travel more than 3 billion miles to Pluto for its close encounter with the dwarf planet. The spacecraft is now on its way to a new target located about 1 billion miles from Pluto.

You can (and should) explore the new mosaic directly through NASA using this high-resolution image.