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Lake Magadi is the southernmost lake
Lake

A lake is a terrain feature , a body of liquid on the surface of a world that is localized to the bottom of basin and moves slowly if it moves at all....
 in the Kenya
Kenya

The Republic of Kenya is a country in East Africa. It is bordered by Ethiopia to the north, Somalia to the northeast, Tanzania to the south, Uganda to the west, and Sudan to the northwest, with the Indian Ocean running along the southeast border....
 Rift Valley
East African Rift

The East African Rift is part of the larger Great Rift Valley. It is a continental rift zone that appears to be a developing Divergent boundary....
, lying in a catchment of faulted volcanic rocks, north east of Lake Natron
Lake Natron

Lake Natron is a salt lake located in northern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, in Africa's Great Rift Valley. The lake is quite shallow, less than three meters deep, and varies in width depending on its water level....
. During the dry season, it is 80% covered by soda
Sodium carbonate

Sodium carbonate , , is a sodium salt of carbonic acid. It most commonly occurs as a crystalline heptahydrate, which readily efflorescence to form a white powder, the monohydrate....
 and is well known for its wading birds, including flamingo
Flamingo

Flamingos or flamingoes are wikt:gregarious wading birds in the genus Phoenicopterus and family Phoenicopteridae. They are found in both the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere, but are more numerous in the latter....
s.

Lake Magadi is a saline, alkaline lake, approximately 100 square kilometers in size, that lies in a graben
Graben

A graben is a depression block of land bordered by parallel Fault s. Graben is German language for ditch.A graben is the result of a block of land being downthrown producing a valley with a distinct Escarpment on each side....
. The lake is an example of a "saline pan". The lake water, which is a dense sodium carbonate
Sodium carbonate

Sodium carbonate , , is a sodium salt of carbonic acid. It most commonly occurs as a crystalline heptahydrate, which readily efflorescence to form a white powder, the monohydrate....
 brine
Brine

File:Kissingen-Solepumpe-1848.JPGFile:Kissingen-Solepumpe-1848-2.JPGBrine is water Saturation or nearly saturated with a Salt .It is used to preserve vegetables, fish, and meat, in a process known as brining ....
, precipitates vast quantities of the mineral trona
Trona

Trona ; sodium3hydrogen2·2water) is an evaporite mineral. It is Mining as the primary source of sodium carbonate in the United States, where it has replaced the Solvay process used in most of the rest of the world for sodium carbonate production....
 (sodium sesquicarbonate).






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Lake Magadi is the southernmost lake
Lake

A lake is a terrain feature , a body of liquid on the surface of a world that is localized to the bottom of basin and moves slowly if it moves at all....
 in the Kenya
Kenya

The Republic of Kenya is a country in East Africa. It is bordered by Ethiopia to the north, Somalia to the northeast, Tanzania to the south, Uganda to the west, and Sudan to the northwest, with the Indian Ocean running along the southeast border....
 Rift Valley
East African Rift

The East African Rift is part of the larger Great Rift Valley. It is a continental rift zone that appears to be a developing Divergent boundary....
, lying in a catchment of faulted volcanic rocks, north east of Lake Natron
Lake Natron

Lake Natron is a salt lake located in northern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, in Africa's Great Rift Valley. The lake is quite shallow, less than three meters deep, and varies in width depending on its water level....
. During the dry season, it is 80% covered by soda
Sodium carbonate

Sodium carbonate , , is a sodium salt of carbonic acid. It most commonly occurs as a crystalline heptahydrate, which readily efflorescence to form a white powder, the monohydrate....
 and is well known for its wading birds, including flamingo
Flamingo

Flamingos or flamingoes are wikt:gregarious wading birds in the genus Phoenicopterus and family Phoenicopteridae. They are found in both the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere, but are more numerous in the latter....
s.

Lake Magadi is a saline, alkaline lake, approximately 100 square kilometers in size, that lies in a graben
Graben

A graben is a depression block of land bordered by parallel Fault s. Graben is German language for ditch.A graben is the result of a block of land being downthrown producing a valley with a distinct Escarpment on each side....
. The lake is an example of a "saline pan". The lake water, which is a dense sodium carbonate
Sodium carbonate

Sodium carbonate , , is a sodium salt of carbonic acid. It most commonly occurs as a crystalline heptahydrate, which readily efflorescence to form a white powder, the monohydrate....
 brine
Brine

File:Kissingen-Solepumpe-1848.JPGFile:Kissingen-Solepumpe-1848-2.JPGBrine is water Saturation or nearly saturated with a Salt .It is used to preserve vegetables, fish, and meat, in a process known as brining ....
, precipitates vast quantities of the mineral trona
Trona

Trona ; sodium3hydrogen2·2water) is an evaporite mineral. It is Mining as the primary source of sodium carbonate in the United States, where it has replaced the Solvay process used in most of the rest of the world for sodium carbonate production....
 (sodium sesquicarbonate). In places, the salt is up to 40 m thick. The lake is recharged mainly by saline hot spring
Hot spring

A hot spring is a Spring that is produced by the emergence of Geothermal groundwater from the earth's crust . There are hot springs all over the earth, on every continent and even under the oceans and seas....
s (temperatures up to 86°C) that discharge into alkaline "lagoons" around the lake margins, there being little surface runoff in this arid region. Most hot springs lie along the northwestern and southern shorelines of the lake. During the rainy season a thin (<1 m) layer of brine covers much of the saline pan, but this evaporates rapidly leaving a vast expanse of white salt that cracks to produce large polygons. A single species of fish, a cichlid
Cichlid

Cichlids are fish from the family Cichlidae in the order Perciformes. The family Cichlidae, a major family of perciform fish, is both large and diverse....
 Alcolapia grahami
Alcolapia grahami

Alcolapia grahami is a species of fish in the Cichlidae family. It is found in Kenya and Tanzania. Its natural habitat is intermittent saline lakes....
, inhabits the hot, highly alkaline waters of this lake basin and is commonly seen in some of the hot spring pools around the shoreline where the water temperature is less than 45°C.

Lake Magadi was not always so saline. Several thousand years ago (during the late Pleistocene
Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 1.8 million to 10,000 years Before Present covering the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
 to mid-Holocene
Holocene

The Holocene is a geological Epoch which began approximately 11,700 years ago . According to traditional geological thinking, the Holocene continues to the present....
) the Magadi basin held a freshwater lake with many fish, whose remains are preserved in the High Magadi Beds, a series of lacustrine and volcaniclastic sediments preserved in various locations around the present shoreline. Evidence also exists for several older Pleistocene precursor lakes that were much larger than present Lake Magadi. At times, Lake Magadi and Lake Natron
Lake Natron

Lake Natron is a salt lake located in northern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, in Africa's Great Rift Valley. The lake is quite shallow, less than three meters deep, and varies in width depending on its water level....
 were united as a single larger lake.

Lake Magadi is also well known for its extensive deposits of siliceous chert
Chert

Chert is a fine-grained silica-rich microcrystalline, cryptocrystalline or microfibrous sedimentary rock that may contain small fossils. It varies greatly in color , but most often manifests as gray, brown, grayish brown and light green to rusty red; its color is an expression of trace elements present in the rock, and both red and green ar...
. There are many varieties including bedded cherts that formed in the lake and intrusive dike-like bodies that penetrated through overlying sediments while the silica was soft. Most famous is "Magadi-type chert", which formed from a sodium silicate mineral precursor magadiite
Magadiite

Magadiite is a hydrous sodium silicate mineral which precipitates from alkali brines as an evaporite phase. It forms as soft white powdery monoclinic crystal masses....
 that was discovered at Lake Magadi during the 1960s.

Magadi
Magadi, Kenya

Magadi, Kenya is a town in the Great Rift Valley at Lake Magadi, located southwest of Nairobi, in southern Kenya. Magadi is northeast of Lake Natron in Tanzania....
 township lies on the lake
Lake

A lake is a terrain feature , a body of liquid on the surface of a world that is localized to the bottom of basin and moves slowly if it moves at all....
's east shore, and is home to the Magadi Soda factory, owned by Tata India since December 2005. This factory produces soda ash, which has a range of industrial uses.

The lake is featured in Fernando Meirelles's film The Constant Gardener
The Constant Gardener (film)

The Constant Gardener is a 2005 in film drama film directed by Fernando Meirelles. The screenplay by Jeffrey Caine is based on the John le Carr? The Constant Gardener....
, which is based on the book of the same name
The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener is a 2001 novel by John le Carr?. It tells the story of Justin Quayle, a United Kingdom diplomat whose activism wife is murdered....
 by John le Carré
John le Carré

John le Carr? is an English author of spy fiction, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold....
, although in the film the shots are supposed to be at Lake Turkana
Lake Turkana

Lake Turkana , formerly known as Lake Rudolf, is a lake in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, with its far northern end crossing into Ethiopia....
.

A causeway
Causeway

In modern usage, a causeway is a road or railway elevated on a sandbank, usually across a broad body of water or wetland. A transport corridor that is carried instead on a series of arches, perhaps approaching a bridge, is a viaduct....
 that crosses the lake provides access to the area west of the lake (Nguruman Escarpment). There is no tourist accommodation at Magadi townsite.