We’ve seen our fair share of videos of cars and trucks attempting to drive through rivers.
Heck, we’ve even built our own underwater delivery car.
This is a first for us, though; seeing a pink lake with a train running through it.
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Said “pink lake” is actually called Lake Burlinskoye, and it’s located in Siberia close to the Kazakhstan border.
Lake Burlinskoye isn’t any ordinary lake, though.
At the height of summer, it undergoes a psychedelic transformation, turning an intense shade of pink.
The question is, how and why does it happen?
Without getting too scientific, it’s due to the lake’s population of tiny artemia salina brine shrimp spiking, their hemoglobin pigmentation visibly dying the waters.
As you can imagine, Lake Burlinskoye attracts tourists from far and wide, some of which come to bathe in its purportedly medicinal waters.
Many come to see something else that makes the lake a stranger sight still: the train that runs right through it.
Although only a short train, it eases itself down the banks on rails that were laid during the Soviet era.
It’s a wonder the rails haven’t crumbled, as one of the lake’s other traits is its salinity, which is supposedly nearly as high as the Dead Sea’s.
But that’s precisely why the train is there in the first place.
It’s actually equipped with harvesting tools that disturb the lake bed and collect the stirred-up sediments in the cars towed behind.
It’s an operation that reportedly dates back to 1768 but it’s now mechanized, with Burlinskoye’s salt harvesters producing 65,000 tons of the mineral annually.
The crazy thing is, though; that’s only enough to cover all of humanity’s dietary intake for three to four days.
You don’t have to travel to the Russian countryside to see a pink lake, as there’s actually bodies of saltwater closer to home which also assume this color under the right conditions.
Head to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah or even Dusty Rose Lake in British Columbia, to see for yourself.
