The alarming signs have convinced the government, the mining company and the racing community to take action. The 20-kilometer-long racetrack has crumbled to 12 kilometers and the central basin, where salt is thickest, has degraded from a depth of 1.5 meters to 30 centimeters. Extreme storms, like last winter’s heavier-than-usual rains, have swept in from the surrounding watershed and dissolved the hard, salty surface into a muddy slush. A large potash mine, just across Interstate 80 and south of the raceway, has drawn brine away from the aquifer under the salt flat for decades. The unwelcome decision put the 115-square-kilometer salt flats’ vulnerability in sharp relief.

Without a firm track, organizers were forced to cancel Bonneville Speed Week, a major racing tournament, for the second consecutive year. This year its normally rock-hard crust looked like gray, gritty soup.

Now the sprawling salt pan, about 185 kilometers west of Salt Lake City, is in trouble. Land speed records have been made and broken on its lunarlike surface for more than a century. Plans to link this remote area to the modern world via new infrastructure are underway, with the mineral wealth hidden beneath this pristine reflective surface leading some to predict Bolivia will be ‘the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century’.Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats are an iconic setting for car commercials and feature films.

The region is believed to contain the biggest store of lithium in the world – in demand for its use in lightweight batteries. But now the Bolivian government has ambitious plans for mineral extraction that will bring big changes to the isolated landscape. But, come the rainy season (roughly November to April), it is often covered with a shallow layer of water, which makes it hard to tell where land ends and the sky begins.įor years, only intrepid tourists and saleros (salt gatherers) have made it to this remote place. It is almost 100 times larger than the famous Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA, and so flat that NASA uses its surface to calibrate sensors on board satellites.ĭuring the dry season, from May to October, the surface crust of sodium chloride – more than 10m deep in places – is parched and cracked and looks as though it belongs on another planet. The 12,000sq km salt-encrusted prehistoric lakebed is located in Potosi, southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes, 3,660m above sea level.

Bonneville salt flats rain