File:Lake Frome (MODIS 2020-04-01).jpg

English: In northeastern South Australia, a large ephemeral lake stretches over a depression approximately 30 miles wide and 60 miles long. In the dry season, Lake Frome exists as little more than a dry crust of salt and minerals.

However, when rains fall or floodwaters creep in (usually from the north), the depression becomes a lake again, providing habitat for a large number of animal and birds. Lake Frome, along with Lake Torrens, Lake Eyre, and other smaller ephemeral lakes in the region, are all remnants of a huge ancestral lake. Named Lake Dieri after one of the Aboriginal tribes living in the area, this body of water stretched over roughly 11,000 square miles in, or slightly larger than the state of Nevada, United States, about 35,000 years ago. Somewhere around 20,000 years ago the lakes began to dry up and the region slowly became quite arid. A handful of ephemeral, salt-crusted lakes are the only remains of Lake Dieri.

On March 31, 2020, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a stunning true-color image of Lake Frome surrounded by arid lands colored in reds and ochre.

With extreme heat over much of Australia in recent years, especially in 2019-2020, the shrinkage of Lake Frome is likely to continue. Satellite comparisons can be very helpful in estimating the size and changes in such ephemeral lakes over time. The NASA Worldview app allowed the creation of an animated series of images of Lake Frome on March 31 starting in 2015 and ending in 2020. To view the animation, click HERE.Then click on the arrow to run.

The NASA Worldview app provides a satellite's perspective of the planet as it looks today and as it has in the past through daily satellite images. Worldview is part of NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System. EOSDIS makes the agency's large repository of data accessible and freely available to the public.