“It was so sweltering you could dehydrate in about half an hour,” he said. Herbertson and his crew survived with the help of the local Masai Tribe who worked their walking sticks into makeshift stretchers to carry them out of the water, but it was a bad experience. “The next thing I knew I was in the lake and the water was burning my eyes.” The conditions in Lake Natron can vary and they don't suit everyone, like this wildebeest.

“The skids hit the water and we just crashed and smashed into pieces,” Sydney cameraman Ben Herbertson told The Sydney Morning Herald. 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. 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☏). 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. Owl Steals Stick Horse And Flies It Around Neighborhood Like A Witch On A BroomstickĪs 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.

Natron lake stone