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- Hacker News
- That was interestingby ironqcold
- I’m always amazed at when we find life in places where the conditions aren’t very suitable, but I’m never surprised. Life is everywhereby Aboutplants
- “Metals like iron, potassium, manganese, copper, and molybdenum are known to accumulate in deep-sea brine pools”
Time to reassess the reflecting pool saga
by JSR_FDED - There are lakes underneath the ices, ponds underneath oceans, and seas beneath seas.
These brine pools are tiny salty ponds on the seabed -- David Byrne was on to something: there is water at the bottom of the ocean -- and there tiny salty ponds in Antarctica too, and lakes underneath the glaciers.
Lake Vostok underneath the Antarctic icecap is in the world top 10 by some measures, and it's one of many.
The Black Sea is two layered seas: the top layer filled in very early historical times, if you accept that it's behind the legend of the flood. It's warm and oxygenated and full of life. The older smaller Black Sea is still there underneath it, cold and dark and devoid of oxygen, but still things live in it.
by lproven - Extremely interesting page, thank you, am reading through it.
It's amazing what can live where. There are microbes a mile down and a mile up, in near boiling water and in subzero conditions.
by nephihaha - Anoxic brine pools are beautiful and uncanny. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/hB2ogu7nw4r9YZWfHoUgLi-192... https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/multimedia/daily-image-media-...
From the exploration vehicle Nautilus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGLtMWx28hs
Their existence isn't intuitive. You'd expect diffusion to dilute the pools and yet they seem to last a very long time somewhere on the order of thousands of years. It's not immediately obvious to me how the physics of these pools functions because there is a persistent interface as if the brine is another liquid entirely. From another paper, "Discovery of the deep-sea NEOM Brine Pools in the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea,"
but if you sample the pool itself,The CTD measurements from 1200 m depth, through the brine pool interface (1769.46 m) and 2 m below (1771.50 m) revealed that the bathyal water column above the brine pool has a stable 21.33 °C temperature, the salinity of 40 PSU, and dissolved oxygen of 180 μmol L−1.
The brine is also hotter than the water just above it,Within 15 cm beneath the brine interface, salinity rose from 40 PSU to values higher than the limits of the conductivity probe (120 PSU). Subsequent lab analysis of the brine provided actual salinity values of 160 PSU. Dissolved oxygen values fell more than 75% at the interface, reaching 50 μmol L−1 by 20 cm submergence into the brine, and further falling to a minimum value of <10 μmol L−1 by 50 cm below the interface.
from, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00482-xUnlike salinity and dissolved oxygen, the temperature did not abruptly change across the brine interface. Instead, the temperature gradually increases below the brine interface at a rate of 0.1 °C per 20 cm depth increase, reaching an increment of 1.0 °C above the temperature of ambient seawater by 2 m depth into the brine (Fig. 4). The temperature differential to ambient did not increase with deeper submergence. Such a modest warming increment suggests the lack of proximal hydrothermal heating of the brine.Nature is beautiful.
by areoform