Travel to Salar de Uyuni

Tens of thousands of years ago, what is now the world’s largest salt flat lay beneath a vast prehistoric lake. Lake Minchin, a giant inland sea that by some estimates once covered much of southwestern Bolivia’s Altiplano, began the slow transformation that would create one of Earth’s most extraordinary landscapes. As the climate shifted and the Andes kept rising, this ancient water gave way through later lakes known as Tauca and Coipasa before drying almost completely around eleven thousand years ago.

That evaporation left a crystalline legacy: some 10 billion tons of salt spread across 10,582 square kilometers at 3,656 meters, a surface so flat it varies by less than a meter from end to end. That flatness makes the Salar so useful for calibrating satellite altimeters from orbit that agencies have used it to fine-tune instruments like NASA’s ICESat. Beneath the crust lies a brine holding one of the world’s largest lithium resources, by United States Geological Survey figures roughly a fifth of all the lithium identified on Earth and the largest such resource of any country, though very little has yet been commercially extracted.