![]() ![]() If they spent any longer in the lake, they would have died.Ĭurrently, Lake Natron is under threat. It burned their eyes and skin, but they managed to drag themselves ashore. Everyone survived the crash but they were in the water unprotected. In 2007, a helicopter carrying a group of wildlife videographers wishing to get footage of the flamingos crashed into the lake. People have occasionally survived the lake’s potency. Lake Natron would have saved pharaonic embalmers a lot of work. The ancient Egyptians used sodium carbonate and bicarbonate in the mummification process. Photo: Shutterstockįor most humans, the lake’s qualities are more suitable for the dead than the living. The lake doesn’t quite have that instant effect. The graphically eerie positions looked like the finger of Medusa had really touched them. Wildlife photographer Nick Brandt made headlines in 2013 by staging photos of the mummified remains of the poor creatures around Lake Natron. They drown in the toxic potion, and their outsides and insides calcify. The mirror-like surface tricks them into diving into the red waters for food. Some alkaline tilapia (a member of the cichlid family) can sustain themselves in the cooler parts of the lake.īut to some wildlife, especially birds, Lake Natron can be a death trap. Somehow, a few species of fish, invertebrates, and algae manage to live in the lake. In Lake Natron, their pigment paints the water a striking red. Generally, cyanobacteria carry different pigments. The lake’s salinity has welcomed salt-consuming, halophilic microorganisms called cyanobacteria, which need photosynthesis to survive. Lake Natron’s deceptively glassy surface. Its average alkalinity is 10.5, its pH surpasses 12, and its water temperature ranges from 40˚ to 60˚C. This concentrated the trona (sodium sesquicarbonate dihydrate) and natron (hydrated sodium carbonate) in the leftover water, creating a highly toxic brine. Since the lake had no outflow and received irregular rainfall, it endured thousands of years of intense evaporation from the heat. During the Pleistocene period, a rare type of lava rich in sodium and potassium carbonates ran down the slopes of the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano and into the lake. It’s fed by the Southern Ewaso Ng’iro River in Kenya. This shallow but wide lake is just three metres deep but 22km wide. Tanzania has no less than four alkaline lakes, but Lake Natron is the most famous. Lake Natron is a hypersaline and highly alkaline lake located in the eastern section of the volatile East African Rift. In North Tanzania, a unique inland lake turns wildlife to stone. That’s a legend, but a natural wonder in Africa today does just that. Story by Kathryn Hansen.We all know about the Greek monster Medusa, whose deadly gaze turned men to stone. NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. And when the waters recede during the dry season, flamingos favor the area as a nesting site, as it is mostly protected from predators by the perennial moat-like channels and pools of water. Small, salty pools of water can fill with blooms of haloarchaea-salt-loving microorganisms that impart the pink and red colors to the shallow water. While the environment is too harsh for most common types of life, there are some species that take advantage of it. The mixture moves through the ground via a system of faults and wells up in more than 20 hot springs that ultimately empty into the lake. Volcanoes, such as Ol Doinyo Lengai (about 20 kilometers to the south), produce molten mixtures of sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate salts. Evaporation usually exceeds that amount, so the lake relies on other sources-such as the Ewaso Ng’iro River at the north end-to maintain a supply of water through the dry season.īut it’s the region’s volcanism that leads to the lake’s unusual chemistry. In a non-El Niño year, the lake receives less than 500 millimeters (20 inches) of rain. ![]() In these images, you can see the deepest water along the perimeter of the lake bed, the location of lower-elevation lagoons. They show the lake on March 6, 2017, very early in the rainy season that runs from March to May. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured these natural-color images of Lake Natron and its surroundings. The lake is mostly inhospitable to life, except for a few species adapted to its warm, salty, and alkaline water.īut you don’t need to visit the lake in person to see its stunning, seasonal color. Not many people venture near the shores of Lake Natron in northern Tanzania. ![]()
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