Africa-Press – Lesotho. The brine pools are located at the bottom of the Gulf of Aqaba, with the largest of the pools measuring about 10,000 square meters. Researchers from the University of Miami have made an intriguing discovery at the bottom of the Red Sea in the form of rare brine pools.
According to Live Science, while such extraordinarily salty pools are among the most extreme environments on our planet, they actually teem with life.
The researcher observed that enterprising predators such as fish, shrimp, and eels apparently use the pools to hunt, as any animal that strays into the brine, which is devoid of oxygen, “is immediately stunned or killed,” and these predators then “feed on the unlucky.
The pools were discovered during an expedition in 2020 in the Gulf of Aqaba, which is located at the northern tip of the Red Sea, and were named the NEOM Brine Pools after the Saudi company that funded the research.
The largest pool measures about 10,000 square meters, with the pools located roughly 1.77 kilometers below the surface. The team made the find by using a remotely operated underwater vehicle from the OceanXplorer, a sophisticated research vessel that belongs to the marine exploration organization OceanX. Aside from the Red Sea, other bodies of water that are known to host deep-sea brine pools are the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean.
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