A lake in Tanzania called 'Lake Natron' is just like any other lake from afar, but up-close one can see what big difference it has: it is dangerous, dark, and most of all deadly, as it can transform any creature into a lifeless "rock hard" statue.
Nick Brandt, a professional photographer, braved the deadly waters and managed to approach its shoreline, where he saw a number of eerie sightings: stiff, calcified corpses of animals including birds and bats.
According to Huffington Post, these creatures had for some reason met their untimely demise following an unavoidable crash to the inviting waters of the deadly lake.
"No one knows for certain exactly how [these animals] die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake's surface confuses them, causing them to crash into the lake," Brandt wrote in his photo book 'Across the Ravaged Land.' "The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry."
Lake Natron is described as a body of water that is "inhospitable to life" though it serves as a thriving space for certain bacteria and algae as well as a breeding area for the "endangered Lesser Flamingo."
The New Scientist stated that the deadly lake has some kind of bacteria that makes its water blood-red, adding that it has high salt content and its temperature can reach up to "140 degrees Fahrenheit."
"Discovering [these animals] washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron, I thought they were extraordinary -- every last tiny detail perfectly preserved down to the tip of a bat's tongue, the minute hairs on his face," Brandt, who snapped photos of calcified animals in Lake Natron way back in 2010 and 1012, wrote. "The entire fish eagle was the most surprising and revelatory find."
"There was never any possibility of bending a wing or turning a head to make a better pose -- they were like rock," he said, "so we took them and placed them on branches and rocks just as we found them, always with a view to imagining it as a portrait in death," he added.
Brandt wrote that the animals were preserved in positions in as life-like a manner possible, giving them that beautiful look of dead animal portraits. He even noted that they appear "alive again in death."
Meanwhile, experts have not yet stated an in-depth explanation on how the transformation of these creatures take place and the length of time it would take for an animal to get calcified to the bare bone.
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