Editor’s Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.
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It appears in satellite pictures like great blotches of blue and green ink; swirling, spreading, sinking into parchment paper.
In Australia’s arid center, those blotches represent a new inland sea, born from a deluge that has traveled hundreds of miles through the veins of a giant, parched continent.
The rare event is now breathing life into the desert, bringing mammals, birds and tourists to the heart of the Australian outback.
Australian outback transformed by water
“Imponderable” is how ecologist Richard Kingsford of the University of New South Wales describes the possibilities for scientific discovery offered by the rise of this sudden oasis in one of the world’s thirstiest areas.
“It’s the water birds, the spectacular flowing water through the middle of a desert. It’s the fish that are in the rivers. It’s also the months afterwards, where you get carpets of wildflowers growing across the desert,” he says.
“Rare events are not well understood, because they’re rare. We don’t know quite how big this flood is going to be.”
Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is a 3,668-square-mile ephemeral lake and, despite the name is rarely very wet, receiving just 5.5 inches of rain on average per year. It could be more readily thought of as a giant salt pan in the South Australian desert.
In 1964, British speed record breaker Donald Campbell used Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre as a racetrack, rocketing to a then-world land record speed of 403.1 mph across the wide, unbroken expanse.
Ten years after Campbell’s shot across the salt flats, in 1974, the lake filled to its capacity for just the third time on record. That flooding has been taken as the high-water mark and not seen since, though smaller-scale events have been recorded in recent years.
This year, after Tropical Cyclone Alfred dumped on inland Queensland in March, the water flowing down to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre appears to be filling it for just the fourth time in 160 years.
There are two main arteries feeding Lake Eyre — the Georgina-Diamantina River, which began filling Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre’s north in early May, and the Cooper Creek system.
Cooper Creek, named somewhat erroneously by early British explorer Charles Sturt, is hardly a creek.
“It can be 60 to 80 kilometers (about 37-50 miles) wide in a flood,” says Kingsford.
The water brought by that second system has not yet reached Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre and may not take its full effect until October.
By the time it does arrive, the desert ecosystem will be feeling the explosive extremes of its boom-and-bust cycle. Shrimps and crustaceans will be spawning, fish numbers will skyrocket, mammals like the endangered Crest-tailed Mulgara and the Dusky Hopping Mouse will get their chance to propagate. Pelicans, stilts and other waterbirds will find their way to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre from as far away as China and Japan. The dust and sand will turn green, blooming in native shrubs with colorful flowers.
The birds are not the only ones flying in to see this oasis.
“There are not many wild places on earth anymore, and this is a wild place and a spectacular place,” Kingsford says. “Quite clearly, these floods bring many local and international visitors to see this phenomenon.
“It does trigger a tremendous tourism boom.”
The influx of visitors hasn’t been without growing pains as the area adapts to its newfound popularity. In February, the South Australian government announced a new ban on people walking on the lake bed, both to protect the fragile salt crust and surface, and to prevent injuries in a remote place where medical help is not always close at hand. The ban also supports the cultural practices of the Arabana people, who consider the lake sacred.
But according to a recent report by Australian public broadcaster ABC, people continue to venture out onto the lake bed due to a lack of signage highlighting the rule. The government has said it will add new signage and visitor infrastructure to the area soon.
To serve the tourist market, operators like Phil van Wegen dedicate themselves to a life in Australia’s remote outback. Marree, a town south of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, is where van Wegen runs Arid Air, a flight company that takes tourists for joyrides over the huge lake on Cessna propeller planes.
“The flight, the route that we do, just blows people away,” he says. To him, the desert is “vast, forever changing and spectacular.”
“So if anyone’s got any ambition to come and see it, Marree is a relatively easy shot. We’re only about 700 kilometers (435 miles) out of Adelaide and its bitumen all the way to the front door,” van Wegen assures.
The Ghan train line ran through Maree up until the 1980s, ensuring a “bumbling busy little town,” van Wegen says. Now he’s one of 50 to 60 people who live there and believes it’s the vast distances that help to keep Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre pristine.
“It’s lucky that it’s just so remote, you know, and it’s so far from anywhere that it just doesn’t get touched or tapped or anything. That’s its own self-preservation.”
That does not mean Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is without its protectors.
Conservationists Annemarie van Doorn and Luke Playford watch over the region like sentinels. Together, the pair manage the Kalamurina Wildlife Sanctuary, a 679,667-hectare property owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy on the eastern shore of the lake. The vastness of their world can only truly be understood from the helicopter they use to do their conservation work. The property they alone are responsible for is the size of Delaware.
When the area is dry, and the roads are open, they can get to the nearest supermarket — a nine-hour drive away in the South Australian town of Port Augusta. Now, however, the floodwaters have cut off the dirt roads that link them to civilization. They’ll stay in their desert home, trapped by water for months, possibly through the rest of the year. The Royal Flying Doctor Service lands once a month to check in on them.
“You just see nothing around you. It’s so, so quiet,” Van Doorn tells CNN by phone.
“There’s no light pollution, there’s no noise. And you look up and there’s a dingo walking around on the sand dune, and you think, ‘how lucky are we?’,” she says.
“Then there’s other times where you’ve got flies crawling up your nose and in your eyes, and it’s 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), and you think, ‘wow, this is pretty miserable,’ but you’re doing it for a great cause.”
The couple’s great cause is keeping a pristine environment that way. That largely involves keeping a lid on the population of feral animals such as wild boar and camels.
Around two-thirds of the water that flows into Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre passes through Kalamurina, and the couple will watch life transform their barren world.
“This is special because it’s a natural event,” Playford says. “It’s the largest flood in 50 years, and while that did a lot of damage in Queensland, this is an act that’s not induced by climate change. It’s a special occasion.”
“A good news story,” van Doorn adds. “There is hope out there.”
That hope is shared by ecologist Kingsford, who will join tourists, conservationists and other scientists in hours of outback road and air travel to catch a glimpse of a desert turned temporarily fecund.
“I’m a conservation biologist, and so it’s often depressing to look at the world and what we’re doing to it, and this gives me incredible optimism to be able to see this system still going through its natural rhythms in such a spectacular way.”
