Dallol
Interesting facts
- In the Afar language the name Dallol is usually explained as 'dissolution' or 'disintegration'.
- Some of Dallol's hot springs are so acidic that their pH falls below zero, among the most extreme values measured in natural water.
- The spring water can exceed 108°C, is almost ten times saltier than seawater and carries more than 26 grams of iron per litre.
- Much of the vivid palette, from lime and yellow to red and purple, comes from dissolved iron oxidising as brine meets the air.
- A steam-driven explosion in 1926 blasted a crater about 30 metres across into the salt.
- The dome rises about 60 metres above the surrounding salt plain, yet its top still lies some 48 metres below sea level.
- Measurements taken in 1960–66 gave an average annual temperature of 34.6°C, a record for an inhabited place.
- A 2019 French–Spanish study found no life in the most acidic and salty ponds, concluding that their combination of acidity, salt and magnesium is too hostile.
- An Italian company mined about 25,000 tonnes of potash ore here in 1925–29, and the abandoned mining buildings were built of salt blocks.
- A narrow-gauge railway was laid in 1917–18 to carry salt and potash from Dallol towards the Red Sea coast.
Why it is worth it
Dallol holds a specific, narrow record: it has the highest average annual temperature recorded for an inhabited place on Earth, not just a single extreme reading. The distinction matters because plenty of uninhabited deserts post higher peak temperatures — Dallol's claim rests on its average daily maximum of around 41°C together with the Afar salt caravans that have worked the surrounding flats for generations.
The colour is the part photographs never quite get right. Magma from nearby volcanic activity heats groundwater that rises through the salt flat and deposits minerals as it evaporates, and depending on which minerals dominate — sulfur, or dissolved iron oxidising as it meets the air — the crust that forms comes out yellow, orange, green, or a mottled combination that shifts across a few metres of ground. It is mineral chemistry doing what looks, from a distance, like deliberate landscaping.
The Danakil Depression that Dallol sits inside — about 125 metres below sea level — exists because three tectonic plates are pulling apart from the same point, a rare triple junction slowly tearing the Horn of Africa away from the rest of the continent. Given enough geological time, the same rifting is expected to eventually flood the region and open a new ocean; Dallol currently sits inside a process that looks static on human timescales but is anything but.
Good to know
The heat is extreme and constant, with little seasonal relief — visits are typically timed for early morning to avoid the worst of the midday temperatures.
Getting there
51 km from Arerti. Mekele Alula Aba Nega Airport (MQX) is about 119 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Dallol is a unique, terrestrial hydrothermal system around a cinder cone volcano in the Danakil Depression, northeast of the Erta Ale Range in Ethiopia. It is known for its unearthly colors and mineral patterns, and the very acidic fluids, commonly noted as some of the most acidic on Earth, that discharge from its hydrothermal springs.
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