Animals exposed to the water die, gradually stiffen into ghostly statues.īrandt told New Scientist, “I couldn’t help but photograph them. “The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds.” writes Brandt.

Enter these waters at your own risk.īrandt visited the lake while working in Africa and discovered calcified corpses of bats and birds scattered along the shoreline. The steaming hot lake is colored bright red by bacteria. Water temperatures can reach 140 ☏ and alkalinity hovers around pH 10, similar to ammonia. Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran is the largest lake in the Middle East, and the third largest saltwater lake on earth.Īnd the Dead Sea, bordered by Jordan, Israel and Palestine, holds the title as the deepest of the world’s salty seas.īut those majestic waters all step aside as, just in time for Halloween, Lake Natron steps onto the podium as the world’s most frightening: The Caspian Sea, bordered by Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, is both the world’s largest lake and the largest saltwater lake. It’s hot, chalky waters can turn birds and land animals into calcified statues, spookily captured by photographer Nick Brandt in his new book, Across the Ravaged Land.

The Middle East boasts some of the world’s saltiest waterbodies, but none approach the horror of Lake Natron in Tanzania, one of the harshest environments on the planet.

Is lake natron deadly