Deadly Lake in Africa Turns Animals Into Stone
Photographer Nick Brandt has been exploring east Africa for a couple of decades now, bridging the lives of local people and animals with the rest of the world through his captivating monochrome shots. And this time he brings yet another amazing story from Lake Natron, a lake which turns dead animals into stone.
Although the local fauna has accumulated to living conditions in the area, Lake Natron in northern Tanzania is still a very harsh place to live. Temperatures in the lake can reach up to 140 F (60 C), and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5.
During his trip there Brandt found dead birds calcified and washed ashore: “I could not help but photograph them,” he said. “No one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake.”
What was left for him to do was to arrange dead birds in “living positions” to create these eerie images of the living dead.
More info: nick brandt (h/t: newscientist, mymodernmet)
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