Australian Outback — Lake Eyre Salt Pan Season
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Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) in South Australia photographed from the air during a rare flood event — the usually dry salt pan filled with shallow red-brown floodwater, pelicans and ibis visible as white clusters on the water surface.
Description
Lake Eyre fills completely perhaps four times per century — the rest of the time it is a dry salt pan at 15 metres below sea level, the lowest point in Australia. When Queensland flooding sends water down the Diamantina, Georgina, and Cooper Creek systems into the lake, a temporary inland sea forms in the arid interior, attracting massive concentrations of water birds to feed on the brine shrimp that hatch from dormant cysts in the salt layer. This aerial image was made during one such event from a Cessna at 400 metres altitude: the lake surface is a shallow pink-red from the iron minerals in the floodwater and the brine shrimp, the salt pan edges visible as white fringe around the water boundary, and large white aggregations of pelicans and straw-necked ibis are visible on the water surface. The flat horizon of the gibber plain extends unbroken in every direction.
