A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1229 entries
soda lake
A soda lake is a closed lake made strongly alkaline by dissolved carbonate salts, often at a pH above 10, which is caustic enough to burn skin and to strip flesh from a carcass. They form where volcanic rock supplies the carbonate, evaporation concentrates it, and there is no outlet. Despite the chemistry, they are among the most productive waters on earth, carrying dense blooms of specialized algae and bacteria.
Etymology
The English name is for the soda, meaning sodium carbonate, which was the substance the lakes were exploited for and which is the same alkali obtained by burning glasswort and kelp. The Egyptian lakes of the Wadi Natrun supplied the natron used in mummification and gave their name to the element sodium by way of the mineral.
Notes
Lake Natron in Tanzania is the principal breeding site for the world’s lesser flamingos, which nest on islands in water that almost nothing else can enter, feed on the algae, and are protected by the chemistry from every predator that would otherwise reach them. The birds are pink from the pigment in the algae. Photographs of calcified animals from the lake circulate widely and are usually captioned with more drama than the chemistry warrants.