page_title: Lake Eyre basin
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Lake Eyre basin / Geography
caption_attribution_description: Driving on Bore Track of Strzelecki Desert, South Australia
context_page_description: The Lake Eyre basin is a drainage basin that covers just under one-sixth of all Australia. It is the largest endorheic basin in Australia and amongst the largest in the world, covering about 1,200,000 square kilometres, including much of inland Queensland, large portions of South Australia and the Northern Territory, and a part of western New South Wales. The basin is also one of the largest, least-developed arid zone basins with a high degree of variability anywhere. It supports about 60,000 people and a large amount of wildlife, and has no major irrigation, diversions or flood-plain developments. Low density grazing is the major land use, occupying 82% of the total land within the basin.
  The basin began as a sinking landmass mostly covered by forest and contained many more lakes than now. The climate has changed from wet to arid over the last 60 million years. Most of the rivers in the Lake Eyre basin are now slow flowing, flat and completely dry for lengthy periods.
context_section_description: During years of especially high rainfall, all the riverbeds in this vast, mostly flat, arid and semi-arid area lead inland (not towards the sea) towards Lake Eyre in central South Australia.
  Lake Eyre itself lies approximately 16 metres (52 ft) below sea level, and usually contains only salt. In flood years, it fills and, for a short time, undergoes a period of rapid growth and fertility: long-dormant marine creatures multiply and large flocks of waterfowl arrive to feed and raise their young before the waters evaporate once more.  The annual mean runoff in the Lake Eyre Basin is lowest of any of the world's major drainage basins.
  None of the creeks and rivers in the Lake Eyre Basin are permanent: they flow only after heavy rain – a rare to very rare event in the arid interior of Australia. Average annual rainfall in the area surrounding Lake Eyre is 125 millimetres (4.9 in), and the pan evaporation rate is 3.5 metres (11 ft). Annualised average figures are misleading: since 1885 annual rainfall over the 1,100,000 square kilometres (420,000 sq mi) of the Lake Eyre Basin has ranged from about 45 millimetres (1.8 in) in 1928 to over 760 millimetres (30 in) in 1974. Most of the water reaching Lake Eyre comes from the river systems of semi-arid inland Queensland, roughly 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) to the north.
  To provide a sense of scale, the Lake Eyre Basin is about the size of France, Germany and Italy combined. It is slightly larger than the Murray-Darling basin (which drains inland eastern Australia and is responsible for a large proportion of the continent's agricultural productivity) but has vastly less water. Nevertheless, the entire flow of the Murray-Darling would be insufficient to fill Lake Eyre, merely keeping pace with evaporation. In contrast, the flow of the Mississippi could fill Lake Eyre in 22 days, that of the Amazon in just 3 days.
  Other lakes in the basin include Lake Frome, Lake Yamma Yamma and Lake Hart.
caption: Strzelecki Desert, South Australia
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