Hot Springs Lake Natron

Hot Springs Lake Natron draws bicarbonated alkaline water from the geothermal springs feeding Lake Natron, an extreme soda lake in the Rift Valley of northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border, where the lake's sodium carbonate concentration, derived from the volcanic Lengai ash and the hot springs flowing from the Ol Doinyo Lengai carbonatite volcano, creates one of the most chemically hostile environments for most life on Earth while simultaneously supporting the largest breeding colony of lesser flamingos in the world, with up to 2.5 million birds nesting on the caustic mud flats. Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Mountain of God in the Maasai language, is the only active carbonatite volcano on Earth's surface, its eruptions producing a black lava composed of sodium and potassium carbonates rather than the silicate magma of all other volcanoes, lava that at 500 degrees Celsius is the coolest flowing lava on Earth and that turns white upon contact with atmospheric moisture, creating a volcanic landscape of alien appearance whose theological significance to the Maasai people is proportionate to its geological uniqueness. The bicarbonated springs of Lake Natron, whose alkalinity and temperature support ecosystems found nowhere else on Earth, offer an encounter with geothermal chemistry at its most extreme, in a landscape where Maasai pastoralists, flamingo colonies, and an active carbonatite volcano share the same Rift Valley depression in one of the most concentrated assemblages of ecological, geological, and cultural exceptionalism on the African continent.