In southwest Turkey, about 2 hours by car from Antalya, a mirror of turquoise water shimmers under the Anatolian sun that excites both the traveler and the scientist.
Lake Salda is the only known place on Earth that is analogous to the lake that once filled Mars’ Jezero Crater, and NASA’s Perseverance Rover team actually visited Lake Salda in the lead-up to its launch to study it.
Briony Horgan, a professor at Purdue University’s Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department, traveled with the NASA team to Lake Salda, and after studying the area, said she felt as if she were looking at the ancient Jezero Crater lake.
Salda is “of that composition that was created at the bottom of an ocean when the oceanic crust ripped apart and made new crust straight out of the interior of the Earth,” which makes it a “planetary analog” to Mars, Horgan told CNN Travel.
Surrounded by green hills and beige rock, Lake Salda sits in what tour companies like to call the Turkish Lake District, and is a great place for hiking and enjoying nature. The area is home to 30 species of water bird, and the lake, with its enticing color, is great for responsible swimming.
Nearby are two ancient cities, Kibyra and Sagalassos, pending UNESCO World Heritage status, and the whole thing can be reached from Antalya with a short scenic drive through the countryside.
All three of these destinations may be in the background of the region’s most famous site, Paumakkale. Looking like something out of Yellowstone, the terraces of pearl white rock formations bubbling with geothermally heated water bring tourists from all over the world to bathe in it and marvel at the geology of the place.
But Lake Salda is equally worthy of geological esteem and the protections it should afford. In fact, the International Commission on Geoheritage (IUGS) announced the inclusion of Lake Salda on its list of the world’s Top 100 geological sites.
In recent years, environmentalists have called for greater protections on the lake and the surrounding ecosystem that grew up with it. Even though it is protected by Turkish law as a national conservation area, disturbances to the surrounding ecosystem, shrinking water levels, and pollution are still affecting it.
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Horgan described it as “a wonderful location that I hope many people get to see. But it’s the kind of place we should make sure we appreciate responsibly.”
Visitors can start by considering that the lake has no outflow, so any pollution or waste that enters it, remains. They can also steer clear of the exposed, coral-like structures of microorganisms that took millions of years to build up, some of which now stand exposed above the water level.
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There are no replacing these in any of our lifetimes, so if your son or a friend goes to snap a piece off to take home, explain to them that if every visitor did the same, what took millions of years to build would all be gone in just two or three.
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