Is There a Lake at the Bottom of the Ocean? - Video

Yes. About 1,000 m (3,300 ft) down in the Gulf of Mexico there's a small salt lake that scientists nicknamed the Jacuzzi of Despair.

Its water is brine, up to about three times saltier than the sea around it. Brine that salty is so heavy it barely mixes with seawater, so it pools on the sea floor like a lake, with its own surface and shoreline. This one sits inside a crater rim about 3 m high, and brine spills over one side like a waterfall. Methane bubbles rise from it, there's very little oxygen in it, and a probe pushed about 19 m down never found a solid bottom, just brine and then soupy mud.

The salt comes from a shallow sea that dried up here more than 160 million years ago. Its salt got buried under the sea floor, and the brine seeps back up through it.

The brine can be deadly to animals that fall in, and the explorers found dead crabs preserved along its edge.

It isn't hot, by the way: the brine measured about 8 °C (46 °F) and the mud under it about 19 °C (66 °F).

The whole story of what's down there is in our long film: What's Really at the Bottom of the Ocean?

Sources:
The Jacuzzi of Despair, measurements and the dead crabs (Cordes et al. 2016, Oceanography 29(1) supplement): https://tos.org/oceanography/assets/images/content/29-1_supplement.pdf
Video from the 2015 dive (Ocean Exploration Trust): https://nautiluslive.org/video/2015/06/01/brine-pool-hot-tub-despair
Brine pools of the Gulf of Mexico (NOAA Ocean Explorer, archived): https://web.archive.org/web/2015/https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/02mexico/background/brinepool/brinepool.html
Why deep brine pools have almost no oxygen (Purkis et al. 2022, Communications Earth & Environment): https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00482-x

#science #ocean #deepsea #brinepool #gulfofmexico #quirkscience