A brine pool is a strange phenomenon: water so dense with salt that it won't mix with seawater and forms a lake on the ocean floor, making it a toxic environment. There is a brine pool in an arm of the Red Sea that has a history of earthquakes and flash floods.
There are brine pools in places where a sea was cut off from other oceans in the past. The closest brine pools in the Red Sea can be found in the Gulf of Aqaba. It has been trapped from the coast for hundreds of years because it is so close to land.
Sam J. Purkis of the University of Miami says that the layers at the bottom of the brine are exquisitelypreserved. There is nothing that touches them.
The pool was discovered by Purkis and his colleagues using a remotely operated vehicle. The briny water is covered by a rind of salt-loving organisms around the pool's perimeter. Shrimp and eels dart into the ultrasalty water to grab small creatures that have ventured in and been stunned by the brine.
The researchers have been drilling from the floor of the pool for a long time. Beverly Tchernov, a marine scientist at the University of Haifa, was not an author on the study.
Mud and silty deposits from roaring rivers that form in the desert during once-every-quarter-century rains are included. Purkis and his team found remnants of an underwater landslide in the Red Sea, and one layer may be related to that.
The team found that the debris was likely transported by the waves. A 1995 magnitude 7.2 earthquake in Egypt may be related to a recent layer.
The Red Sea's northern coast has been mostly empty for a long time. Purkis talked with Saudi Arabian officials about the geological risks of building in that area. Awareness and planning are the keys to this.
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