This Lake Natron in Tanzania Kills, and Makes the Corpse Turn Stone - Facts

Story:

This lake Natron in Northern Tanzania doesn’t just Kill, it makes the Corpse turn Stone.

Other Versions

This Deadly Lake turns animals into statues.

Picture Suggesting This Lake Natron in Tanzania Kills, and Makes the Corpse Turn Stone — This Lake Natron in Tanzania Kills, and Makes the Corpse Turn Stone

Analysis:

The messages come with pictures of statue like animals in and around what is claimed to be the deadly lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. Although the birds did not turn into stones or statues as such, yes, it is a fact – a mysterious one.

The series of mysterious pictures were taken by photographer Nick Brandt between 2010 and 2012, along northern Tanzania’s Lake Natron. Nick reported that the lake contains so much soda and salt that it would strip the ink of his Kodak film boxes in few seconds. As reported, the birds have not turned to stone or statues, but have been made “rock hard” from the high levels of soda ash and salt in the lake. Nick said that the animals were rock hard from the calcification, and as he found them along the shoreline of Lake Natron, he took them and placed them in ‘living’ positions – as a portrait in death.

Picture of Lake Natron, Tanzania — Lake Natron, Tanzania

According to the World Wildlife Fund, Lake Natron is extremely salty and hot, with a pH of 9 to 10 and temperatures going up to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. No one knows for sure how these animals die, but it appears like the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, causing them to crash into the lake and die as a result. According to NBC News, the lake is so alkaline that when creatures that die and fall in, they do not decompose and wither, but simply get ‘pickled’.

It is to be noted that the unusually harsh composition of Lake Natron comes from a unique neighboring volcano, Ol Doinyo, which expels alkali-rich natrocarbonatites that end up in the lake via rainwater runoff. As you can see the Lake Natron of Tanzania through Google Maps here, it also has an unusual bright color. Even though it is world’s most caustic body of water, some species of fish, the alkaline tilapia, live along the edges of the hot spring inlets, and the lake derives its unusual color from salt-loving microorganisms that thrive in it. Here’s another lake called Pink Lake that gets its color because of the micro organisms in it, and it is so salty that objects and people float easily in these waters.