A calcified dove, from Nick Brandt's book Across The Ravaged Land, published by Abrams, New York. 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, poured out in runny lava flows and blasted into the air to become ash clouds 10 miles high. 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 like beetles and locusts. Nick Brandt / Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery Flamingos are some of the lucky birds that can make the trip across the lake which is 30-miles wide at its longest point. Thanks to the horny protective layer on the legs and beak, the flamingos often manage to survive the Natron lake."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," David Harper, an ecologist at the University of Leicester who has visited Lake Natron four times, told NBC News. No, they are not the men and much less the pigeons of the squares, but the pink flamingos. # The invincible species that survives the hellish lake Credits: NatronĮveryone thinks that this is the infernal lake or the lake of death, but a species of animal manages to survive the chemical composition of Lake Natron. This is how when animals, especially bats and birds, touch the water of Lake Tanzania, the minerals inside begin to turn them into stone, trapping them in the position they took before they touched the cursed lake. This substance makes the waters of the lake have the same properties of ammonia with a pH between 9 and 10.5 and a temperature of about 60 ✬, creating an environment so corrosive that almost no animal can survive. Lake Natron is called this way because of the presence of the natural compound of sodium carbonate hydrate (in fact Natron) within its waters. # Natron: the sodium carbonate hydrate that kills Credits: Natron However, you should not imagine the classic blue lake, but rather a basin of reddish water with deep white streaks typical color of those lakes rich in sodium and often subject to evaporation cycles. The lake that turns animals into stone is called Lake Natron and is located in northern Tanzania, in the African Rift Valley at about 600m altitude. THE LAKE that turns ANIMALS into STONE # The Lake of Death Credits: natron This time, however, we are not talking about magic, but only about nature. It might remember one of the punishments of some evil witch, when then the good protagonist always comes to save the poor creatures.
A mix between a horror film scene and reality, yet there really is a lake that turns animals into stone.
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