Natron Lake, Tanzania
Lake Natron is a soda lake in northern Tanzania with a volcanic geology that maintains the pH of the water around 10.5 – almost as caustic as the ammonia. Still, some life forms can prosper in the local inhospitable.
In Tanzania there is a caustic lakeswim red, which transforms Animals in ‘Stone’: Lake Natron, which has such an aggressive chemical composition that it is uninhabitable for most creatures.
It is a “De soda” lakewhich means it has high sodium levels and dissolved carbonate, explains the.
Due to this high concentration of salts and minerals, the pH of the lake can reach 10.5, almost as caustic as an ammonia solution – And as a result, animals that die on the banks of Lake Natron are preserved as calcified mummies.
Natron Lake is located throughout the eastern African rifta border of divergent tectonic plates that has been tearing the African plate and the in two since the myocene for 2 to 25 million years.
Its special geology leads to the lake to be shaped by volcanic processeswhich produce large amounts of sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate.
These salts and other minerals drain to the lake of the surrounding hills and enter the water under thermal sources, but the lake does not drain to any river or sea, so the chemical concentration remains high all year round.
Few animals can survive at a level of salt and pH as high as those of Lake Natron, and Water can severely burn the skin and the eyes of the creatures trying to drink or dive.
But the animals that managed to adapt to these hostile conditions, including the Flamingo-Pequeno from sub -Saharan Africa (Phoeniconaias minor), thrive on the lake and around them. Lago Natron is really the most important place of reproduction in the world for Flamingos-Peokie.
The legs of the flamingos-phelenne have Resistant skin and scales that prevent water burns. These birds build nests on islands that form on the lake during the dry season, and their young are safe from most predators thanks to deadly conditions.
In addition to being extremely alkaline, Lake Natron is so shallow that the temperature of the water can reach 60 ° C during the hottest times of the year.
Tem 0.5 meters deep and 15 kilometers widebut shrinks and expands depending on the climate, with less rain and entry of rivers during the dry season leading it to contract (and vice versa).
When the lake shrils, the microorganisms that feed on its salts multiply, as is each haloarchaea (organisms that like salt and have no core) and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), which can color the lake in different shades of red thanks to the pigments in your cells.
These are the same pigments that give their flamingos-phelenne, which feed almost exclusively on blue-green algae.
Natron gained notoriety in 2013, when the photographer Nick Brandt He published images of “stone” animals on the banks of the lake, in his “Across the Ravaged Land”.
The images showed poultry and bat carcasses that had died on the banks of the lake and were preserved by sodium carbonate. Brandt positioned them in branches and water to They seem “alive again in death”said the photographer.
“I unexpectedly found the creatures, all kinds of birds and bats, spread along the Natron Lake coast,” writes Nick Brandt in his book. “No one knows for sure how they die”.
