The flattest place on earth

November 17, 2011 9:42 PM

As the salar has no natural outflow, when it does rain the salar floods with an extremely thin layer of water (barely ankle deep even at its most extreme), creating what is essentially the world’s largest mirror.
posted by Chrysostom (16 comments total)

That is amazing. I love the panorama shot of the "island" with all of the SUVs docked. I think they are all Toyotas.
posted by bz at 10:30 PM on November 17, 2011

That site tied my browser into knots. "This javascript file is running long" popups several times. What the hell are they doing, anyway?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:32 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

It's an utterly bizarre place, and blindingly bright. But well worth visiting if you get the chance.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 10:37 PM on November 17, 2011

This significantly crashed my browser after telling me if I wanted to continue because the script stopped.
posted by infini at 11:11 PM on November 17, 2011

This site put my browser in a coma.
posted by quazichimp at 11:20 PM on November 17, 2011

Sorry, guys-I posted from the RSS feed. I went to the link after seeing people had issues; it hiccuped for a few seconds, but then worked fine. Running FF9, for what it's worth.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:22 PM on November 17, 2011

Got it to work now, just took a little patience, Thanks, Chrysostom.
posted by quazichimp at 11:32 PM on November 17, 2011

Direct link to the youtube slideshow, for those who are having problems.

I just had to dig up the bike shot on flickr. Wow.
posted by mek at 11:41 PM on November 17, 2011

Part of the reason why the site is so slow is that it embeds an image that is 8827x1235 pixels large (and asking the browser to resize it to something like 800x100).
posted by destrius at 1:22 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

Here's a no-script version. All around awesome blog, thanks
posted by hat_eater at 1:31 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

This is a 50-minute documentary on salt. It is fascinating. Really. There's not a lot of talking, but a ton of beautiful footage of people harvesting salt in increasingly technically complex ways all over the world. The first and best part is in the Altiplano featured here, and as you can expect from these pictures, video footage of it is amazing.
posted by kitarra at 6:22 AM on November 18, 2011

I believe that there is one Mitsubishi Montero in that panorama. Probably badged as a Pajero.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:43 AM on November 18, 2011

Yup, crashed firefox. Who the hell is blogblog.com? They're now in my hosts file.

Weren't there some plans to mine the salt from the salar? Thought I read it right here... ah yes, Bolivia's Lithium Dream.
posted by phliar at 3:25 PM on November 18, 2011

Blogblog.com is a Blogger server.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:07 PM on November 18, 2011

Because of the lack of physical markers, it's easy (and apparently irresistible!) to create forced perspective photo illusions on the Salar.
posted by taz at 2:29 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]

More pictures here: Salar de Uyuni - A Spectacular Sea of Salt
posted by homunculus at 2:02 PM on November 19, 2011