'Death pool' at bottom of the ocean instantly kills everything that enters it
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There's a hole, there's a hole, there's a hole at the bottom of the sea and it kills pretty much anything which is foolish enough to try and see what's inside.
Deep beneath the surface of the Red Sea there's a series of deep sea brine pools which almost no creature of the sea can survive.
They were found by a team of researchers from the University of Miami and further study could help uncover some of the secrets about what this planet of ours was like in the early days.
A total of four of these 'death pools' were discovered on the sea floor by the researchers, with three of them being no larger than 10 square metres in diameter but the biggest of the four being about 10,000 square metres.
It's one of the most extreme environments on Earth, with no oxygen and yet absolutely teeming with all sorts of life, and as far as scientists know there's only a few dozen of them in the entire world.
While the pools themselves are teeming with microbes that can survive in the extreme brine, pretty much any other denizens of the deep coming into contact with these pools are done for.
With no oxygen in the brine any sea creature that needs the element (basically all of them) is either killed instantly or becomes stunned and ends up helpless.
Those creatures that aren't instantly killed by the oxygen-less brine are easy pickings for patient predators lurking nearby to gobble them up.
Professor Sam Purkis, lead author of the study into the 'death pools' discovered at the bottom of the ocean, told Live Science these pools could hold the key to our understanding what things were like when life first appeared on our planet.
"Deep-sea brine pools are a great analog for the early Earth and, despite being devoid of oxygen and hypersaline, are teeming with a rich community of so-called 'extremophile' microbes," he said, before suggesting that what we learn here could help us find new life far beyond the stars.
"Studying this community hence allows a glimpse into the sort of conditions where life first appeared on our planet, and might guide the search for life on other 'water worlds' in our solar system and beyond."
While fish use the pools to hunt anything that gets too close due to their inhospitable nature to almost all creatures, the lack of animals that would normally live on the sea bed and churn it up aren't in these pools.
That means the sediment and sea bed in the pools could be pretty much the same as it's always been and Professor Purkis said the sedimentary layers in the pools were 'exquisitely intact'.
Even below our oceans there's a massive amount of water 400 miles beneath our feet where the supply of water is larger than all the oceans of our planet combined.
Meanwhile the part of the world where these 'death pools' are located will one day be home to a new ocean as the African, Arabian and Somali tectonic plates move away from each other and very slowly split the earth.
There are also other holes at the bottom of the sea through which water is 'gushing out like a firehose', though at least it's going somewhere that's already wet.
Topics: News, Science, Weird, World News
