Atacama Lithium Fields — Desert Salt Pan Aerial
244.60 £
The lithium brine fields of the Atacama Salt Flat photographed from 400 metres — industrial evaporation ponds in concentric rectangles of green, turquoise, yellow, and white creating an accidental abstract painting on the desert floor.
Description
The Atacama Salt Flat of northern Chile contains the world’s largest reserves of lithium carbonate — a mineral extracted through a brine evaporation process that creates the sequence of industrial ponds whose colour progresses from turquoise through green to yellow as the mineral concentration increases through successive evaporation stages. From the air at 400 metres, the ponds lose their industrial context and become purely abstract colour fields — rectangles of saturated turquoise, lime green, golden yellow, and chalk white arranged in geometric patterns across the pale salt flat of the surrounding salar. This image was made from a charter aircraft at the optimal light angle for maximum colour saturation in the ponds — the late afternoon when the low sun illuminates the evaporation pond surfaces from a low angle. The surrounding salt flat provides the neutral white context that allows the pond colours to register at full saturation.
