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The Danakil Depression sits 125 metres below sea level in northeastern Ethiopia, where average annual temperatures exceed 34°C and rainfall barely reaches 25mm a year. The Afar people have lived here for centuries, mining salt from vast evaporated lake beds and transporting it by camel caravan — a trade that once served as currency across the Horn of Africa. The landscape is geological rather than terrestrial: sulphur springs, active lava lakes, and acid pools in colours that appear synthetic. Dallol, within the depression, holds the record for the highest average temperature of any inhabited place on earth.