No one knows exactly how these animals die when they come in contact with the lake, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses the animals, causing them to crash into the lake. This means water only flows in but doesn’t flow out, so it only escapes by evaporation.Īs the water evaporates overtime, it leaves behind a high concentration of salt alongside other minerals just like that of the Dead Sea and Utah’s Great Salt lake.
This deadly Lake in northern Tanzania, is a salt lake. This has made the lake to concentrate into a caustic alkaline brine. It's lavas are made of high amounts of carbonate with very low calcium and magnesium levels. The bedrock around the lake is composed of alkaline, sodium-dominated trachyte lavas that were laid down during the Pleistocene period. This in turn has led to high alkalinity of the lake which can reach a stagering pH of greater than 12 be which is almost as high as ammonia. Continue reading about the natural phenomena in this NBC News article.Lake Natron is located in the Gregory rift,in the Arusha region of Tanzanian and is of high international significance.ĭue to High levels of evaporation, there's a large deposit of natron (sodium carbonate decahydrate) and trona (sodium sesquicarbonate dihydrate). The culprit is Ol Doinyo Lengai, a million-year old volcano just south of Lake Natron. How did the lake get this hostile? The “salt” in it isn’t the regular table variety harvested from seawater, but magmatic limestone that’s been forged deep in the Earth.
Water levels fluctuate easily because it’s so hot – when the levels drop, the corpses are left behind on the shores, coated in salt, exactly how Brandt found them.
Small birds or bats that try and fail to cross the 12- by 30-mile lake fall in, as do insects who don’t make it across or realize what they’re getting into. If a body falls anywhere else it decomposes very quickly, but on the edge of the lake, it just gets encrusted in salt and stays forever, biologists say. The lake is full of thousands of well-preserved carcasses – it’s so alkaline, creatures that die and fall in don’t decompose and wither, they simply get pickled. The photographer said he “took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life.'”
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