The World’s Largest Natural Mirror

2008 March 8
by madhavgopalkrish
Videos: 1, 2
clipped from fogonazos.blogspot.com
Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat at 10,582 km²
The salt is over 10 meters thick in the center. In the dry season, the salt planes are a completely flat expanse of dry salt, but in the wet season, it is covered with a thin sheet of water which makes the most beautiful reflections.
You can see every mountain and every cloud reflected in the salar and you can’t tell how far away they are or where the sky starts and ends [1].
Due to its large size, smooth surface, high surface reflectivity when covered with shallow water, and minimal elevation deviation, Salar de Uyuni makes an ideal target for the testing and calibration of remote sensing instruments on orbiting satellites used to study the Earth.
In addition to providing an excellent target surface the skies above Salar de Uyuni are so clear, and the air so dry, that the surface works up to five times better for satellite calibration than using the surface of the ocean.
  blog it
No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Note: You can use basic XHTML in your comments. Your email address will never be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS