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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Laguna Del Diamante

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.61.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A toxic lake high in the Andes mountains in Argentina is home to microbes that provide a window to our planet’s past — and a key to securing its future. READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/laguna-del-diamante

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Okay, you want to come with me to the end and slag by your imagination, okay, close your eyes.

0:07.9

You've been bouncing around in the backseat of a 4x4 truck for more or less 7 hours.

0:14.0

For a while, you're surrounded by a dry desert, but then, as you approach the Andy's mountains,

0:20.3

the scenery comes alive.

0:24.2

When it makes you wow, take your friend away.

0:28.1

Because you have volcanoes, you have lakes, full of flamingos, you have different colors,

0:34.0

the color stage, and you are climbing and climbing, and you are alone.

0:39.2

There's no one else, there's no road, and you are making that road, in fact.

0:47.2

You drive higher and higher up the side of a gigantic volcano, until you reach a precipice.

0:55.0

You get off the car and look out over the edge of La Caldera.

0:59.0

It's a huge volcanic crater, miles across.

1:03.0

You see all the lakes inside and gays are with 80 degrees void in water.

1:11.0

That's 80 degrees Celsius, which is about 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

1:17.0

The water is also toxic, it's e-times as salty as the ocean, and it's filled with arsenic.

1:23.0

But these gazes of water are also beautiful to look at.

1:28.0

And in the border of that gays there are different colors.

1:34.0

And those colors, you know, that each color represents a different community of microbes

1:41.0

that are working in the same way that the ancestral life workers.

1:54.0

And ancestral microbes.

1:57.0

It sounds a little bit like magic.

1:59.0

But the microbes that live in these boiling, toxic volcanic geysers,

2:04.0

they can take us back to the origin of human life.

...

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