Off-season Lake Eyre Flood Filling Season — South Australia
Lake Eyre — Kati Thanda — is Australia's largest lake and usually its most barren: a 9,500-square-kilometre salt pan sitting 15 metres below sea level that is almost always empty of water, its white salt surface cracked and glittering under the arid interior sun. Roughly once per decade, heavy rainfall in Queensland fills the Lake Eyre Basin's 1.14-million-square-kilometre catchment and sends a flood pulse 1,000 kilometres down Cooper Creek to fill the lake. When it fills — as in 1974, 1984, and 2009 — it becomes a vast inland sea that attracts hundreds of thousands of waterbirds (pelicans, stilts, avocets), the salt dissolved by fresh water producing a lake that turns pink and red from halophyte algae, and the spectacle of pelicans breeding in the dead centre of the Australian outback is one of ecology's most dramatic reversals.
About this spectacle
Lake Eyre — Kati Thanda — is normally a vast, blinding white salt pan, cracked and silent beneath the relentless outback sun. Roughly once a decade, a flood pulse travels 1,000 kilometres down Cooper Creek from Queensland rains, transforming this 9,500-square-kilometre depression into an inland sea. As fresh water dissolves the salt, halophyte algae tint the shallows vivid pink and red. Hundreds of thousands of waterbirds — pelicans, banded stilts, red-necked avocets — descend from across the continent to breed on islands that hours before were baked desert. The sight and sound of pelican colonies nesting in the dead centre of Australia's arid interior is overwhelming: a wall of bird noise against absolute silence, pink water stretching to every horizon, and a sky dense with wings. No other phenomenon in Australia delivers such a dramatic ecological reversal over such an enormous, empty landscape.
When to go
Year-round
Getting there
Nearest airport: MRE. Nearest city: Coober Pedy.
Booking options
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