Wow, those images are really striking. I can't help but think that this would be a cool thing to study, especially in say, a high school or something. I know that high school me would have been excited to learn what's going on with this lake and its preservative properties from both a chemical and biological perspective.
Whoa. Definitely a ton of high school chemistry lessons here. Reminds me of a research paper I was required to write at Michigan State for a Geophysics course. I got to choose a geological anomaly to study in the years BG (before Google). Another African Lake, Lake Nyos in Cameroon belched forth a cloud of CO2 gas in 1986. The lake sits in a volcanically active region. The heavier than air gas flowed down the hillside into nearby communities and asphyxiated 1,700 people and 3000 or so cattle. Dangerous lakes. Makes me very happy to live in the Great Lakes Region of the U.S..
I was wondering how did those birds got caught by the lake's waters in such normal positions.For the series of photos, titled “The Calcified” and featured in this month’s issue of New Scientist, Brandt posed the carcasses in life-like positions. “But the bodies themselves are exactly the way the birds were found,” he insists. “All I did was position them on the branches, feeding them through their stiff talons.”
FWIW, I (and most of the Mountain West) got my deep water certification at Blue Hole, which has a pH of 10.5. It's not like some crazy acid bath; there are, in fact, some condemned goldfish swimming around. Just pointing out that this isn't some hell lake. Elodea canadensiscan survive in pH 10 water. I don't think it'll thrive, though.