Theses Dangerous Red Sea 'Death Pools' Can Kill Anything That Swims Into Them [Watch]

A 10-foot-long lethal brine pool has been discovered at the bottom of the Red Sea. The pool of salt-rich water will instantly kill anything that enters it. However, scientists believe this "death pool" could provide an ocean of information about the evolution of marine life.

Using a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), a team of scientists from the University of Miami located the pool at a depth of 1,770 meters, Live Science reported. They also found three minor pools less than 10 square meters in diameter.

Professor Sam Purkis, a researcher with the Center for Carbonate Research at the University of Miami, told Live Science that the pool contains dangerous concentrations of salt that are lethal to marine creatures or humans.

The Red Sea's rare brine basins are exceedingly salty. They are incapable of supporting sea creatures because they have absolutely no amount of oxygen.

"At this great depth, there is ordinarily not much life on the seabed," Purkis said. "However, the brine pools are a rich oasis of life. Thick carpets of microbes support a diverse suite of animals."

"Most interesting among those were the fish, shrimp, and eels that appear to use the brine to hunt," Purkis said, "Any animal that strays into the brine is immediately stunned or killed, and the predators that lurk near the brine feed on the unlucky."

These hypersaline death pools are located near the coast and they preserve useful information about tsunamis, flash floods and earthquakes that occurred years ago in the Gulf of Aqaba, the northern tip of the Red Sea. Such information may be extremely relevant for the vast infrastructure projects that are currently being developed on the Gulf of Aqaba shoreline, researchers wrote in a study published in Communications Earth and Environment.

The brines, named NEOM Brine Pools, were discovered during a 2020 expedition on the research vessel OceanXplorer along Saudi Arabia's coastline with the Red Sea. The entire expedition was filmed.

There are only a few dozen deep-sea brine pools known to scientists in the entire world, ranging in size from a few thousand square feet to nearly a square mile (2.6 square kilometers). Deep-sea brine pools are only known to exist in three bodies of water: the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.

These salty underwater lakes have caught the attention of scientists because they are believed to provide answers to how Earth's seas evolved millions of years ago.