A salt lake in Argentina has emerged from orbit as a nearly perfect pink heart, spanning almost 6.2 miles across at its widest point.
Its color and shape now mark a living system that changes with rainfall and evaporation, turning a striking image into a record of water and salt in motion.
Two hearts, one sky
From space, Salinas Las Barrancas in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province holds that heart-shaped outline in a shallow basin below sea level.
By tracing the lake’s shifting color to its biological source, Maria A. Sierra, Ph.D., at Weill Cornell Medicine mapped the salt-tolerant microbes that give such basins their pink hue.
Her team showed that these organisms thrive under intense sun and rising salinity, allowing the lake’s appearance to intensify or fade as water levels change.
Because that color…