Wednesday, March 25, 2015

The Story Behind Australia's Pink Lake

By Ken Jennings
March 23,2015; 12:09PM,EDT
 
 

Credit: Wildlight Photo Agency / Alamy
In this week's Maphead column, Ken Jennings looks at Australia's Lake Hillier, a body of water notable for its high salt content and its color-it's a shade of Pepto Bismol pink.
The big idea behind these "Maphead" posts-the raison d'etre, if you will-is to sniff out geographical oddities. These are places that are somehow unique or weird on the map, often more interesting than they are in real life. But when it comes to Australia's Lake Hillier, that all depends on what kind of map you're looking at. In the pages of an atlas, it's a pretty boring blue oval on an equally boring little island. But look at Lake Hillier on a digital map, and you won't believe your eyes. In aerial imagery, Lake Hillier is colored a bilious, Pepto-Bismol shade of pink.

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Lake Hillier's island was undiscovered until 1802.
Off the southern coast of Western Australia is a chain of islands called the Recherche Archipelago. The largest of them, Middle Island, is an uninhabited nature preserve covered in dense eucalyptus forest. The islands were first mapped by Matthew Flinders, a British explorer who captained the HMS Investigator. In January 1802, Flinders went ashore and climbed to the island's highest peak, which is today named for him.

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