Salar de Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni, in the Daniel Campos Province of Bolivia's Potosi Department, is the largest salt flat on Earth, covering about 10,582 square kilometers at an elevation of roughly 3,656 meters. It formed as a sequence of prehistoric lakes dried up: the region was covered by the giant Lake Minchin around 30,000 to 42,000 years ago, which gave way to Paleo Lake Tauca roughly 13,000 to 26,000 years ago and then to Lake Coipasa about 11,500 to 13,400 years ago, with each successive lake leaving behind a thicker deposit of dissolved salts as it evaporated. Today the surface is an 8-meter-thick crust of salt so flat that elevation varies by less than a meter across the entire expanse. Beneath that crust, brine holds lithium at a concentration of about 0.3 percent, and Bolivia's reserves there, estimated at around 23 million tonnes as of 2024, represent roughly 22 percent of the world's known lithium. This entity documents Salar de Uyuni specifically as a geological formation, an evaporite deposit left by the drying of a chain of Pleistocene lakes.