"Humans cannot, and would die if their legs were exposed for any length of time.” So far this year, water levels have been too high for the flamingos to nest.
HOW TO SURVIVE LAKE NATRON SKIN
“Flamingos have evolved very leathery skin on their legs so they can tolerate the salt water," David Harper, a limnology professor at the University of Leicester, tells. When the water hits the right level, the baby birds are kept safe from predators by a caustic moat. Three-quarters of the world’s lesser flamingos fly over from other saline lakes in the Rift Valley and nest on salt crystal islands that appear when the water is at a very specific level-too high and the birds can’t build their nests, too low and predators can waltz across the lake bed and attack. Once every three or four years, when conditions are right, the lake is covered with the pink birds as they stop flight to breed. The unique color comes from cyanobacteria that photosynthesize into bright red and orange hues as the water evaporates and salinity rises before that process occurs during the dry season, the lake is blue.īut one species actually makes life among all that death-flamingos. The water is oversaturated with salt, can reach temperatures of 140 degrees and has a pH between 9 and 10.5-so corrosive that it can calcify those remains, strip ink off printed materials and burn the skin and eyes of unadapted animals.
The lake's landscape is surreal and deadly-and made even more bizarre by the fact that it's the place where nearly 75 percent of the world's lesser flamingos are born. Bats, swallows and more are chemically preserved in the pose in which they perished deposits of sodium carbonate in the water (a chemical once used in Egyptian mummification) seal the creatures in their watery tomb. Want our advice? Admire the magnificent waters from a safe distance.At the base of a mountain in Tanzania’s Gregory Rift, Lake Natron burns bright red, surrounded by the calcified remains of animals that were unfortunate enough to fall into the salty water. “The sweat ran down your forehead and the sulphur would run back into your eyes.'' “It was so sweltering you could dehydrate in about half an hour,” he said. Herbertson and his crew survived with the help of the local Masai Tribe who worked their walking sticks into makeshift stretchers to carry them out of the water, but it was a bad experience. “The next thing I knew I was in the lake and the water was burning my eyes.” The conditions in Lake Natron can vary and they don't suit everyone, like this wildebeest. “The skids hit the water and we just crashed and smashed into pieces,” Sydney cameraman Ben Herbertson told The Sydney Morning Herald. One in 2007 included a group of wildlife photographers who were hoping to film when their helicopter plunged into the lake. There have been several helicopter crashes involving Lake Natron, some of which may have happened for the same reason so many migrating birds end up in the water. Image credit: Sebastien Burel / Has anyone ever fallen into Lake Natron?
Lake Natron's water creates a convincing mirror effect. If you don’t like the idea of turning into a salty statue, you could always go the other watery way of processing bodies: aquamation. Then there are the razor-sharp clumps of salt that almost left camera operator Matt Aeberhard stranded in the caustic waters after his hovercraft got shredded while filming the BBC's A Perfect Planet. First of all, there’s the heat with the water in Lake Natron sometimes reaching a scalding 60☌ (140☏). The resulting pH is enough to burn the skin and eyes of most animals and spell death for those who linger too long, but if a person jumped in would it turn them to “stone” like Brandt’s animals? What would happen if you jumped into Lake Natron?įlamingos have tough, scaly skin that protects them from the water, but humans are a little too soft and squishy to fare so well. Image credit: Thomas Kraft, Kufstein, - Transferred from de.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 3.0 Solidified natrocarbonatite lava in the crater of Ol Doinyo Lengai. Over time, the salty lake has absorbed sodium carbonate and other minerals in natrocarbonatite from the surrounding hills making the water a strong alkaline.
Buzzing Ball Of Cactus Bees Wins Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2022Īs for why the water is so wild, the otherworldly environment sits in the wake of Ol Doinyo Lengai, the only volcano on the planet to belch out one of Earth’s weirdest lavas: Natrocarbonatite.
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