Surrounded by sand dunes, Lake Disappointment is an ephemeral salt lake in one of the most
remote areas of Western Australia. An early explorer supposedly named the lake in 1897
after following a number of creeks that he thought would lead to a large lake; they did, but
the lake’s extremely salty water was not drinkable.
This scene was acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite on December 31, 2000.
Image provided by the
USGS EROS Data Center Satellite Systems
Branch as part of the Earth as Art II image series