Dallol
— — colour where nothing should be living.
Not only on a wall.
“A salt flat in the Afar Depression where the ground turns yellow, green, and orange in a pattern that does not look earned. The hydrothermal field sits more than a hundred metres below sea level, the air temperature averages around the highest of any inhabited place on Earth, and the brine pools at the surface are acid enough to dissolve most things. People come here in convoys, early, with guides from Hamed Ela. The colour is iron and sulphur and salt working on each other in the open. Nothing about Dallol is gentle. The picture is, mostly, the colour.
Dallol, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Dallol is a volcanic and hydrothermal area in the Danakil Depression of the Afar Region in northern Ethiopia, near the border with Eritrea. The site sits at roughly 125 metres below sea level — among the lowest land elevations on Earth — on a salt plain that was the floor of a shallow arm of the Red Sea before it dried out and accumulated thick beds of evaporites. Mount Dallol itself is a cryptodome that last produced a phreatic eruption in 1926. The acidic, iron- and sulphur-rich brine pools at the surface give the field its yellow, green, and orange colour bands.
The yellow comes from elemental sulphur, the orange from iron oxides, the green from copper salts, and the white from the surrounding salt crust. Springs at the surface push out brine at temperatures above 90°C and pH values close to zero. Researchers from CNRS and the University of Bologna have studied the pools for the chemistry and for the extremophile question — Dallol is one of the most acidic, hottest, and saltiest hydrothermal environments on Earth, and studies published in 2019 found certain pools too hostile even for archaea.
Dallol holds one of the highest recorded mean annual temperatures of any inhabited place on the planet — the long-running average for the early twentieth century reads about 34.4°C, with daytime highs in the 40s for much of the year. The air smells of sulphur near the springs and is bone-dry away from them. Access is from the village of Hamed Ela, a few hours' drive from Mekele, in escorted convoys — the area is remote, the border is close, and the route crosses Afar territory where guides are required.