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. Nick Brandt / Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery Amazingly, 2. A calcified dove, from Nick Brandt's book Across The Ravaged Land, published by Abrams, New York. Lake Natrons alkaline waters support a thriving ecosystem of salt marshes, freshwater wetlands, flamingos and other wetland birds, tilapia and the algae on which large flocks of flamingos feed. 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. Photographer Nick Brandt's mesmerizing photographs from Tanzania's Lake Natron of birds and bats that look as if they have turned to stone have been circling around the Web. 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. Their dependence on the location led the International Union for. Nick Brandt / Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery The Lake Flats surrounding the waters edge contain small streams, lakes and hills that provide a variety of hospitable environments for birds that thrive in. Surprisingly, Lake Natron is also a sanctuary for lesser flamingoes, who use the lake as their only regular breeding area. Lake Natron is the only regular breeding area in East Africa for 2.5 million lesser flamingos. 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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