Searles Lake

Searles Lake is a dry basin in the Mojave Desert, close to the Death Valley National Park in California, United States. Searles Lake, bounded by mountains, has no outlet. Glaciers from the Sierra Nevada Range once fed the lake with water and sediment. Over thousands of years, retreating glaciers have carried less and less water into the lake, which gradually dried up due to climatic changes.

Today, the barren remains of the lake resemble a psychedelic lunar landscape. Most of the bone-white, flat surface is sprinkled with dark red, orange, and purple pools containing mineral-saturated brine. Several billion tons of mineral and salt deposits are layered beneath the dried-out plain. Half of the natural elements known occur in the basin.

The brothers and eponymous Dennis and John Searles, who discovered the lake in search of gold, saw the potential of the mineral deposits and later came back to establish a mining company on the shores of the basin.

An estimated 1.7 million tons of industrial minerals are extracted from the basin each year. Among them are borax, salt, potash, soda ash, and sodium sulfate. All basic ingredients that are used for industrial, cleaning, and cosmetics products. Mining those minerals involves a complex process in which the brine is pumped from up to 100 meters underneath the salt pan into a network of solar evaporation ponds, then crystallized, screened, washed, and dried.

The landscape underneath our helicopter appeared as an entangled pattern of tracks, textures, and abstract shapes, dominated by mining operations. As if an architect were trying to plan a layout for a new city but with no obvious structural concept. A complex system of pipes and hoses was laid out on the ground that ended in dark holes, sucking the Earth’s blood. Searles Lake is another example of salt and other mineral extraction for industrial use.