We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight.

'Reanimated, alive again in death.'Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: 'I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in 'living' positions, bringing them back to 'life,' as it were,' Brandt wrote, referring to the way he repositioned the animals. 'No one knows for certain exactly how they die, but … 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.' 'I unexpectedly found the creatures - all manner of birds and bats - washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron,' Brandt wrote in his book. īrandt discovered the remains of flamingos and other animals with chalky sodium carbonate deposits outlining their bodies in sharp relief. Now, photographer Nick Brandt has captured haunting images of the lake and its dead in a book titled 'Across the Ravaged Land' (Abrams Books, 2013). In fact, Lake Natron's 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. And deposits of sodium carbonate - which was once used in Egyptian mummification - also acts as a fantastic type of preservative for those animals unlucky enough to die in the waters of Lake Natron.ĭespite some media reports, the animal didn't simply turn to stone and die after coming into contact with the lake's water.

The water's alkalinity comes from the sodium carbonate and other minerals that flow into the lake from the surrounding hills. The alkaline water in Lake Natron has a pH as high as 10.5 and is so caustic it can burn the skin and eyes of animals that aren't adapted to it. Lake Natron in Tanzania is one of the most serene lakes in Africa, but it's also the source of some of the most phantasmagorical photographs ever captured - images that look as though living animals had instantly turned to stone.

Lake natron animals statues