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. “The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry." “Discovering washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron, I thought they were extraordinary - every last tiny detail perfectly preserved down to the tip of a bat's tongue, the minute hairs on his face,” HuffPost quoted Brandt from his photo book Across the Ravaged Land. You could even end up like the crunchy creatures in Brandt’s images if the water evaporated enough to expose and dry your body. Were you to drown or have your body chucked into Lake Natron, the water's high salt content would stop the decomposition process meaning you'd be preserved like a pickle in brine. Another theory centers around the uniquely mirror-like surface of the water which disorientates flying animals sometimes causing them to crash into the lake.
Lake natron. series#
It’s not known for sure how the animals in Brandt’s photo series died, it’s possible some may have died of natural causes and then fallen into the water. What would happen if your body was submerged in Lake Natron? Depending on rainfall the exact pH changes but at its worst, you’d end up with corrosive burns.
Then you have that near-bleach alkalinity which too would get pretty burny the longer you lingered in the water. Imagine what happens when you step into the salty ocean with a graze, it’d be like that but a lot worse. The extreme saltiness of the soda lake wouldn’t turn you to stone like a glance from Medusa, but it would sting like hell if you had any cuts or breaks in the skin. 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☏).
Lake natron. skin#
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. Watch Incredibly Rare Footage Of A Humpback Whale Calf Feeding UnderwaterĪs 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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