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 Do not let the name
fool you for Lake Eyre is hardly a lake at all
but it is two huge, shallow scoops in the
thirsty heartland of Australia making it the
lowest point in this country. Its salt-caked
floor is dry most of the time, and a rim of
thick, encrusted minerals hangs like hoar frost
round its shores. What you will see here are
parched landscape that stretches away on every
side. But on rare occasions, it can become the
largest lake in Australia when this area
experienced heavy downpours. Simpson Desert lies
on its north while vast plains covered with
dunes and gibbers, sharp stones that make
walking difficult, is located on its east and
west. A ribbon of salt lakes and dry salt pans
sits at its southern region whereby a glimpse of water is always welcomed in
this desolation.
Lying at Australia's
lowest point, with its bottom fifteen meters
below sea level, Lake Eyre receives water from a
region larger than France, Spain and Portugal
put together. Lake Eyre is the focal point of
the Photo: Lake Eyre in Australia vast Lake Eyre Basin. Its two parts are Lake Eyre North
and the much smaller Lake Eyre South which cover
an area of about 9600 square kilometers and are linked by
the fifteen kilometers long Godyer Channel. The
lowest part is filled with playa salt pan which
is caused by seasonal expansion and ensuing
evaporation of the trapped waters.
When
it rains, water runs off the distant mountains
and pours into the dry river courses. If the
rain is heavy enough, the water may reach Lake
Eyre which is one thousand kilometers
downstream. It explodes with teeming life when
water reaches it. Vivid red Sturt's desert pea
spring up while the water revives algae and
shrimp eggs lying dormant in the mud. Soon the
lake is filled with living creatures and then
the birds start to arrive. Pelicans can be seen
setting up breeding colonies along the lake
shore. When the water flow stops, the lake
rapidly evaporates in the intense heat and
becomes increasingly salty and slowly becomes a
hard salt crust over damp mud. It then awaits a
new season of rains to bring it back to life.
The hot sun can bake
the mud to a solid clay pavement. It was here on
the hard flats of Madigan Bay that in 1964,
Donald Campbell broke the world land speed
record for reaching a speed of 644 km per hour
in his turbine-driven car, Bluebird. By the
1830s, most of the coast had been mapped but
much of the hinterland was known only to the
Aborigines. In 1839, Edward Eyre set out with
the intent of becoming the first European to
cross Australia from the south to the north. He
was unsuccessful that time and the following
year, he tried again. Although eventually
reaching the lake that bears his name, the
treacherous mud floor prevented him from going
farther. When Gerald Halligan visited the lake
in 1923, he found out that the lake contain
barely enough water to float a boat.
What has become
clear now is that Lake Eyre can indeed become a
vast expanse of fresh water only once in every
eight or ten years when heavy rains fall for two
summers in succession whereby the first year's
rain saturates the ground so that in the second
year less water is absorbed on the journey down
from the mountains to enable Lake Eyre to be
filled to its brim.
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