A new study shows that rare deep-sea brine pools found in the Red Sea may hold clues to environmental upheavals in the region that span thousands of years.
There are deep-sea brine pools that are very salty. Despite their exotic chemistry and complete lack of oxygen, these rare pools teem with life and may offer insights on how life on Earth began, and how life could evolve and thrive on water rich worlds other than our own.
Sam Purkis is a professor and chair of the Department of Marine Geosciences at the University of Miami. Despite being devoid of oxygen and hypersaline, deep-sea brine pools are teeming with a rich community of so-called 'extremophile'Microbes. Studying this community allows a glimpse into the sort of conditions where life first appeared on our planet, and may guide the search for life on other water worlds in our solar system and beyond.
Purkis said that these pools could yield discoveries that could contribute to the development of new medicines.
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He said that molecules with antibacterial and anticancer properties have been isolated from deep-sea microbes.
The fortress was found along the Red Sea.
There are a few dozen deep-sea brine pools that range in size from a few thousand square feet to about a square mile. The Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea are the only places in the world where deep-sea brine pools can be found.
There are many deep-sea brine pools in the Red Sea. When the sea level in the area was lower than it is today, pockets of minerals were dissolved.
The deepest brine pools in the Red Sea were located at least 25 km offshore. The first such pools have been found in the Gulf of Aqaba, a northern pocket of the Red Sea.
OceanX's research vessel OceanXplorer was used to discover the pools. The Red Sea coastline of Saudi Arabia has received little attention.
The Saudi company that funded the research gave the scientists the name of the pools after they were discovered. The largest pool was 107,000 square feet and the three smaller pools were less than 10 square feet.
Purkis said that there isn't much life on the sea floor. Brine pools are a great place to live. Animals are supported by thick carpets ofMicrobes.
The fish, shrimp and eels seem to use the brine to hunt. Any animal that strays into the brine is stunned or killed. He noted that the unlucky are fed by the predatory animals near the brine.
The close proximity of these pools to the coast means they could have accumulated land-based waste. Purkis said that they could potentially serve as unique archives preserving traces of floods and earthquakes in the Gulf of Aqaba.
burrowing shrimp, worms and mollusks are kept out of the pool because of the lack of oxygen. Purkis said that the animals bioturbate or churn up the sea floor. With the brine pools, it's not so. The beds of the brine pool are exquisitely intact.
Purkis said that the core samples from the newfound brine pools contained an "unusually long record of past rainfall in the region, stretching back more than 1000 years." In the past 1000 years, major floods from serious rain occur about once every 25 years, and sometimes once every 100 years.
These findings may have important lessons for the massive infrastructure projects that are currently being built on the coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba. The coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba is now urbanizing at a rapid rate.
Purkis said that they want to work with other countries that border the Gulf of Aqaba to widen the assessment of earthquake and tsunami risk. We hope to return to the brine pools with more sophisticated coring equipment to try to extend our reconstruction further into antiquity.
In the journal Communications Earth and Environment, the scientists detailed their findings online.
It was originally published on Live Science
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