![]() Other volcanoes usually spew silicates, but the Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only one on the planet that spills "natrocarbonatites" as cool, runny, dark washes. Nick Brandt Captures the Beauty in These Deceased, Calcified Animals by Jaron Schneider Octo26 Comments When it comes to photography, it often takes a lot to truly drop my jaw. It's a favorite among petrologists because it's the only one of its kind, Hannes Mattsson, a researcher at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, told NBC News. ![]() The culprit is Ol Doinyo Lengai, a million-year old volcano just south of Lake Natron. When the photographer Nick Brandt arrived at the coastline of natron lake in northern Tanzania, the scene there surprised him. Nick Brandt / Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery A calcified dove, from Nick Brandt's book Across The Ravaged Land, published by Abrams, New York. How did the lake get this hostile? The "salt" in it isn't the regular table variety harvested from seawater, but magmatic limestone that's been forged deep in the Earth, poured out in runny lava flows and blasted into the air to become ash clouds 10 miles high. Water levels fluctuate easily because it's so hot - when the levels drop, the corpses are left behind on the shores, coated in salt, exactly how Brandt found them. Small birds or bats that try and fail to cross the 12- by 30-mile lake fall in, as do insects like beetles and locusts. Flamingos are some of the lucky birds that can make the trip across the lake which is 30-miles wide at its longest point. "If a body falls anywhere else it decomposes very quickly, but on the edge of the lake, it just gets encrusted in salt and stays forever," David Harper, an ecologist at the University of Leicester who has visited Lake Natron four times, told NBC News.
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