Dry lake

A dry lake bed, also known as a playa (/ˈplaɪ-ə/), is a basin or depression that formerly contained a standing surface water body, which disappears when evaporation processes exceed recharge.

This term is used e.g. on the Llano Estacado and other parts of the Southern High Plains and is commonly used to address paleolake sediments in the Sahara like Lake Ptolemy.

If the layer of water is thin and is moved around the dry lake bed by wind, an exceedingly hard and smooth surface may develop.

These rocks have been recently filmed in motion by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and are due to a perfect coincidence of events.

Finally, when the sun comes out, the ice melts and cracks into floating panels; these are blown across the playa by light winds, propelling the rocks in front of them.

[4] While a dry lake bed is itself typically devoid of vegetation, they are commonly ringed by shadscale, saltbrush and other salt-tolerant plants that provide critical winter fodder for livestock and other herbivores.

In southwest Idaho and parts of Nevada and Utah there are a number of rare species that occur nowhere else but in the inhospitable environment of seasonally flooded playas.

Although a large predatory species, it evaded detection because of the murkiness of the playa's water caused by winds and a fine clay load.

This shrimp species is able to regenerate using tiny undetectable cysts that can remain in a dry lake bed for years until conditions are optimum for hatching.

[5] Lepidium davisii is another rare species, a perennial plant whose habitat is restricted to playas in southern Idaho and northern Nevada.

The extremely flat, smooth, and hard surfaces of dry lake beds make them ideal for fast motor vehicles and motorcycles.

The dry lake beds at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and Black Rock Desert in Nevada have both been used for setting land speed records.