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Australian Outback around Lake Disappointment

 

Surrounded by sand dunes, Lake Disappointment is an ephemeral salt lake in one of the mostremote areas of Western Australia. An early explorer supposedly named the lake in 1897after following a number of creeks that he thought would lead to a large lake; they did, butthe lake’s extremely salty water was not drinkable.

This scene was acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite on December 31, 2000.

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Image provided by the USGS EROS Data Center Satellite Systems Branch as part of the Earth as Art II image series

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